A Maid of the Silver Sea / Oxenham, John, 1852-1941

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Title: A Maid of the Silver Sea

Author: John Oxenham

Release Date: January 29, 2005  [eBook #14832]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


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A MAID OF THE SILVER SEA

by

JOHN OXENHAM

With Frontispiece in Colour by Harold Copping

Hodder and Stoughton Warwick Square, London, E.C.







    TO
    MY FRIEND
    EDWARD BAKER
    OF LA CHAUMIERE, SARK

    ON WHOSE MOST HOSPITABLE AND SUPREMELY
    COMFORTABLE VERANDAH, LOOKING OUT
    TO THE FAIR COAST OF FRANCE, THIS
    STORY WAS PARTLY WRITTEN, I
    INSCRIBE THE SAME IN REMEMBRANCE
    OF MANY
    DELIGHTFUL DAYS
    TOGETHER




CONTENTS

    CHAPTER I
    HOW TWO LAY IN A CLEFT

    CHAPTER II
    HOW NANCE CAME TO BE HERSELF

    CHAPTER III
    HOW THE NEW MINE CAPTAIN CAME

    CHAPTER IV
    HOW GARD MADE NEW ACQUAINTANCES

    CHAPTER V
    HOW NANCE SHONE THROUGH HER MODEST VEILING

    CHAPTER VI
    HOW GRANNIE SCHEMED SCHEMES

    CHAPTER VII
    HOW GARD FOUGHT GALES AND TOM

    CHAPTER VIII
    HOW TOM WANTED TO BUT DIDN'T DARE

    CHAPTER IX
    HOW OLD TOM FOUND THE SILVER HEART

    CHAPTER X
    HOW YOUNG TOM FOUND HIS MATCH

    CHAPTER XI
    HOW GARD DREW NEARER TO HIS HEART'S DESIRE

    CHAPTER XII
    HOW NANCE CAME UP THE MAIN SHAFT WITHOUT GOING DOWN IT

    CHAPTER XIII
    HOW GARD REFUSED AN OFFER AND MADE AN ENEMY

    CHAPTER XIV
    HOW THEY WENT THROUGH THE DARKNESS OF THE NARROW WAY

    CHAPTER XV
    HOW TWO FELL OUT

    CHAPTER XVI
    HOW ONE FELL OVER

    CHAPTER XVII
    HOW TOM WENT TO SCHOOL FOR THE LAST TIME

    CHAPTER XVIII
    HOW PETER'S DIPLOMACY CAME TO NOUGHT

    CHAPTER XIX
    HOW THE SARK MEN FELT ABOUT IT

    CHAPTER XX
    HOW SARK CRAVED BLOOD FOR BLOOD

    CHAPTER XXI
    HOW LOVE TOOK LOVE TO SANCTUARY

    CHAPTER XXII
    HOW THE STARS SANG OF HOPE

    CHAPTER XXIII
    HOW NANCE SENT FOOD AND HOPE TO HIM

    CHAPTER XXIV
    HOW HE SAW STRANGE SIGHTS

    CHAPTER XXV
    HOW HE LIVED THROUGH THE GREAT STORM

    CHAPTER XXVI
    HOW HE HELD THE ROCK

    CHAPTER XXVII
    HOW ONE CAME TO HIM LIKE AN ANGEL FROM HEAVEN

    CHAPTER XXVIII
    HOW THE OTHERS CAME TO MAKE AN END

    CHAPTER XXIX
    HOW HE CAME INTO AN UNKNOWN PLACE

    CHAPTER XXX
    HOW NANCE WATCHED FROM AFAR

    CHAPTER XXXI
    HOW TWO WENT IN AND THREE CAME OUT

    CHAPTER XXXII
    HOW JULIE MEDITATED EVIL

    CHAPTER XXXIII
    HOW HOPE CAME ONCE AGAIN

    CHAPTER XXXIV
    HOW JULIE'S SCHEMES FELL FLAT

    CHAPTER XXXV
    HOW AN ANGEL CAME BRINGING THE TRUTH

    CHAPTER XXXVI
    HOW HE CAME HOME FROM L'ETAT

    CHAPTER XXXVII
    HOW THEY LAID TRAPS FOR THE DEVIL

    CHAPTER XXXVIII
    HOW THEY LAID THE DEVIL BY THE HEELS

    CHAPTER XXXIX
    HOW THEY THANKED GOD FOR HIS MERCIES




CHAPTER I

HOW TWO LAY IN A CLEFT


A girl and a boy lay in a cubby-hole in the north side of the cliff
overlooking Port Gorey, and watched the goings-on down below.

The sun was tending towards Guernsey and the gulf was filled witn golden
light. A small brig, unkempt and dirty, was nosing towards the rough
wooden landing-stage clamped to the opposite rocks, as though doubtful
of the advisability of attempting its closer acquaintance.

"Mon Gyu, Bern, how I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea!" said
the girl vehemently.

"Whe--e--e--w!" whistled the boy, and then with a twinkle in his
eye,--"Who's got a new parasol now?"

"Everybody!--but it's not that. It's the bustle--and the dirt--and the
noise--and oh--everything! You can't remember what it was like before
these wretched mines came--no dust, no noise, no bustle, no dirty men,
no silly women, no nothing as it is now. Just Sark as it used to be. And
now--! Mon Gyu, yes I wish the sea would break in through their nasty
tunnels and wash them all away--pumps and engines and houses--everything!"

And up on the hillside at the head of the gulf the great pumping-engine
clacked monotonously "Never! Never! Never!"

"You've got it bad to-day, Nan," said the boy.

"I've always got it bad. It makes me sick. It has changed everything and
everybody--everybody except mother and you," she added quickly.
"Get--get--get! Why we hardly used to know what money was, and now no
one thinks of anything but getting all they can. It is sickening."

"S--s--s--s--t!" signalled the boy suddenly, at the sound of steps and
voices on the cliff outside and close at hand.

"Tom," muttered the boy.

"And Peter Mauger," murmured the girl, and they both shrank lower into
their hiding-place.

It was a tiny natural chamber in the sharp slope of the hill. Ages ago
the massive granite boulders of the headland, loosened and undercut by
the ceaseless assaults of wind and weather and the deadly quiet fingers
of the frost, had come rolling down the slope till they settled afresh
on new foundations, forming holes and crannies and little angular
chambers where the splintered shoulders met. In time, the soil silted
down and covered their asperities, and--like a good colonist--carrying
in itself the means of increase, it presently brought forth and
blossomed, and the erstwhile shattered rocks were royally robed in
russet and purple, and green and gold.

Among these fantastic little chambers Nance had played as a child, and
had found refuge in them from the persecutions of her big half-brother,
Tom Hamon. Tom was six when she was born--fourteen accordingly when she
was at the teasable age of eight, and unusually tempting as a victim by
reason of her passionate resentment of his unwelcome attentions.

She hated Tom, and Tom had always resented her and her mother's
intrusion into the family, and Bernel's, when he came, four years after
Nance.

What his father wanted to marry again for, Tom never could make out. His
lack of training and limited powers of expression did not indeed permit
him any distinct reasoning on the matter, but the feeling was there--a
dull resentment which found its only vent and satisfaction in stolid
rudeness to his stepmother and the persecution of Nance and Bernel
whenever occasion offered.

The household was not therefore on too happy a footing.

It consisted, at the time when our story opens, of--Old Mrs.
Hamon--Grannie--half of whose life had been lived in the nineteenth
century and half in the eighteenth. She had seen all the wild doings of
the privateering and free-trading days, and recalled as a comparatively
recent event the raiding of the Island by the men of Herm, though that
happened forty years before.

She was for the most part a very reserved and silent old lady, but her
tongue could bite like a whip when the need arose.

She occupied her own dower-rooms in the house, and rarely went outside
them. All day long she sat in her great arm-chair by the window in her
sitting-room, with the door wide open, so that she could see all that
went on in the house and outside it; and in the sombre depths of her
great black silk sun-bonnet--long since turned by age and weather to
dusky green--her watchful eyes had in them something of the inscrutable
and menacing.

Her wants were very few, and as her income from her one-third of the
farm had far exceeded her expenses for more than twenty years, she was
reputed as rich in material matters as she undoubtedly was in
common-sense and worldly wisdom. Even young Tom was sulkily silent
before her on the rare occasions when they came into contact.

Next in the family came the nominal head of it, "Old Tom" Hamon, to
distinguish him from young Tom, his son; a rough, not ill-natured man,
until the money-getting fever seized him, since which time his
home-folks had found in him changes that did not make for their comfort.

The discovery of silver in Sark, the opening of the mines, and the
coming of the English miners--with all the very problematical benefits
of a vastly increased currency of money, and the sudden introduction of
new ideas and standards of life and living into a community which had
hitherto been contented with the order of things known to its
forefathers--these things had told upon many, but on none more than old
Tom Hamon.

Suspicious at first of the meaning and doings of these strangers, he
very soon found them advantageous. He got excellent prices for his farm
produce, and when his horses and carts were not otherwise engaged he
could always turn them to account hauling for the mines.

As the silver-fever grew in him he became closer in his dealings both
abroad and at home. With every pound he could scrimp and save he bought
shares in the mines and believed in them absolutely. And he went on
scrimping and saving and buying shares so as to have as large a stake in
the silver future as possible.

He got no return as yet from his investment, indeed. But that would
come all right in time, and the more shares he could get hold of the
larger the ultimate return would be. And so he stinted himself and his
family, and mortgaged his future, in hopes of wealth which he would not
have known how to enjoy if he had succeeded in getting it.

So possessed was he with the desire for gain that when young Tom came
home from sea he left the farming to him, and took to the mining
himself, and worked harder than he had ever worked in his life before.

He was a sturdy, middle-sized man, with a grizzled bullet head and
rounded beard, of a dogged and pertinacious disposition, but capable,
when stirred out of his usual phlegm, of fiery outbursts which overbore
all argument and opposition. His wife died when his boy Tom was three,
and after two years of lonely discomfort he married Nancy Poidestre of
Petit Dixcart, whose people looked upon it as something of a
_mesalliance_ that she should marry out of her own country into Little
Sark.

Nancy was eminently good-looking and a notable housewife, and she went
into Tom Hamon's house of La Closerie with every hope and intention of
making him happy.

But, from the very first, little Tom set his face against her.

It would be hard to say why. Nancy racked her brain for reasons, and
could find none, and was miserable over it.

His father thrashed him for his rudeness and insolence, which only made
matters worse.

His own mother had given way to him in everything, and spoiled him
completely. After her death his father out of pity for his forlorn
estate, had equally given way to him, and only realised, too late, when
he tried to bring him to with a round turn, how thoroughly out of hand
he had got.

When little Tom found, as one consequence of the new mother's arrival,
that his father thrashed instead of humouring him, he put it all down to
the new-comer's account, and set himself to her discomfiture in every
way his barbarous little wits could devise.

He never forgot one awful week he passed in his grandmother's care--a
week that terminated in the arrival of still another new-comer, who, in
course of time, developed into little Nance. It is not impossible that
the remembrance of that black week tended to colour his after-treatment
of his little half-sister. In spite of her winsomeness he hated her
always, and did his very best to make life a burden to her.

When, on that memorable occasion, he was hastily flung by his father
into his grandmother's room, as the result of some wickedness which had
sorely upset his stepmother, and the door was, most unusually, closed
behind him, his first natural impulse was to escape as quickly as
possible.

But he became aware of something unusual and discomforting in the
atmosphere, and when his grandmother said sternly, "Sit down!" and he
turned on her to offer his own opinion on the matter, he found the keen
dark eyes gazing out at him from under the shadowy penthouse of the
great black sun-bonnet, with so intent and compelling a stare that his
mouth closed without saying a word. He climbed up on to a chair and
twisted his feet round the legs by way of anchorage.

Then he sat up and stared back at Grannie, and as an exhibition of
nonchalance and high spirit, put out his tongue at her.

Grannie only looked at him.

And, bit by bit, the tongue withdrew, and only the gaping mouth was
left, and above it a pair of frightened green eyes, transmitting to the
perverse little soul within new impressions and vague terrors.

Before long his left arm went up over his face to shut out the sight of
Grannie's dreadful staring eyes, and when, after a sufficient interval,
he ventured a peep at her and found her eyes still fixed on him, he
howled, "Take it off! Take it off!" and slipped his anchors and slid to
the floor, hunching his back at this tormentor who could beat him on his
own ground.

For that week he gave no trouble to any one. But after it he never went
near Grannie's room, and for years he never spoke to her. When he passed
her open door, or in front of her window, he hunched his shoulder
protectively and averted his eyes.

Resenting control in any shape or form, Tom naturally objected to
school.

His stepmother would have had him go--for his own sake as well as hers.
But his father took a not unusual Sark view of the matter.

"What's the odds?" said he. "He'll have the farm. Book-learning will be
no use to him," and in spite of Nancy's protests--which Tom regarded as
simply the natural outcrop of her ill-will towards him--the boy grew up
untaught and uncontrolled, and knowing none but the worst of all
masters--himself.

On occasion, when the tale of provocation reached its limit, his father
thrashed him, until there came a day when Tom upset the usual course of
proceedings by snatching the stick out of his father's hands, and would
have belaboured him in turn if he had not been promptly knocked down.

After that his father judged it best for all concerned that he should
flight his troublesome wings outside for a while. So he sent him off in
a trading-ship, in the somewhat forlorn hope that a knowledge of the
world would knock some of the devil out of him--a hope which, like many
another, fell short of accomplishment.

The world knocks a good deal out of a man, but it also knocks a good
deal in. Tom came back from his voyaging knowing a good many things that
he had not known when he started--a little English among others--and
most of the others things which had been more profitably left unlearnt.




CHAPTER II

HOW NANCE CAME TO BE HERSELF


And little Nance?

The most persistent memories of Nance's childhood were her fear and
hatred of Tom, and her passionate love for her mother,--and Bernel when
he came.

"My own," she called these two, and regarded even her father as somewhat
outside that special pale; esteemed Grannie as an Olympian, benevolently
inclined, but dwelling on a remote and loftier plane; and feared and
detested Tom as an open enemy.

And she had reasons.

She was a high-strung child, too strong and healthy to be actually
nervous, but with every faculty always at its fullest--not only in
active working order but always actively at work--an admirable subject
therefore for the malevolence of an enemy whose constant proximity
offered him endless opportunity.

Much of his boyish persecution never reached the ears of the higher
powers. Nance very soon came to accept Tom's rough treatment as natural
from a big fellow of fourteen to a small girl of eight, and she bore it
stoically and hated him the harder.

Her mother taught her carefully to say her prayers, which included
petitions for the welfare of Grannie and father and brother Tom, and for
a time, with the perfunctoriness of childhood, which attaches more
weight to the act than to the meaning of it, she allowed that to pass
with a stickle and a slur. But very soon brother Tom was ruthlessly
dropped out of the ritual, and neither threats nor persuasion could
induce her to re-establish him.

Later on, and in private, she added to her acknowledged petitions an
appendix, unmistakably brief and to the point--"And, O God, please kill
brother Tom!"--and lived in hope.

She was an unusually pretty child, though her prettiness developed
afterwards--as childish prettiness does not always--into something finer
and more lasting.

She had, as a child, large dark blue eyes, which wore as a rule a look
of watchful anxiety--put there by brother Tom. To the end of her life
she carried the mark of a cut over her right eyebrow, which came within
an ace of losing her the sight of that eye. It was brother Tom did that.

She had an abundance of flowing brown hair, by which Tom delighted to
lift her clear off the ground, under threat of additional boxed ears if
she opened her mouth. The wide, firm little mouth always remained
closed, but the blue eyes burned fiercely, and the outraged little
heart, thumping furiously at its impotence, did its best to salve its
wounds with ceaseless repetition of its own private addition to the
prescribed form of morning and evening prayer.

Once, even Tom's dull wit caught something of meaning in the blaze of
the blue eyes.

"What are you saying, you little devil?" he growled, and released her so
suddenly that she fell on her knees in the mud.

And she put her hands together, as she was in the habit of doing, and
prayed, "O God, please kill brother Tom!"

"Little devil!" said brother Tom, with a startled red face, and made a
dash at her; but she had foreseen that and was gone like a flash.

One might have expected her childish comeliness to exercise something of
a mollifying effect on his brutality. On the contrary, it seemed but to
increase it. She was so sweet; he was so coarse. She was so small and
fragile; he was so big and strong. Her prettiness might work on others.
He would let her see and feel that he was not the kind to be fooled by
such things.

He had the elemental heartlessness of the savage, which recognises no
sufferings but its own, and refuses to be affected even by them.

When Nance's kitten, presented to her by their neighbour, Mrs. Helier
Baker, solved much speculation as to its sex by becoming a mother, Tom
gladly undertook the task of drowning the superfluous offspring. He got
so much amusement out of it that, for weeks, Nance's horrified inner
vision saw little blind heads, half-drowned and mewing piteously,
striving with feeble pink claws to climb out of the death-tub and being
ruthlessly set swimming again till they sank.

She hurled herself at Tom as he gloated over his enjoyment, and would
have asked nothing better than to treat him as he was treating the
kittens--righteous retribution in her case, not enjoyment!--but he was
too strong for her. He simply kicked out behind, and before she could
get up had thrust one of his half-drowned victims into the neck of her
frock, and the clammy-dead feel of it and its pitiful screaming set her
shuddering for months whenever she thought of it.

But now and again her tormentor overpassed the bounds and got his
reward--to Nance's immediate satisfaction but subsequent increased
tribulation. For whenever he got a thrashing on her account he never
failed to pay her out in the smaller change of persecution which never
came to light.

On a pitch-dark, starless night, the high-hedged--and in places
deep-sunk--lanes of Little Sark are as black as the inside of an ebony
ruler.

When the moon bathes sea and land in a flood of shimmering silver, or on
a clear night of stars--and the stars in Sark, you must know, shine
infinitely larger and closer and brighter than in most other places--the
darkness below is lifted somewhat by reason of the majestic width and
height of the glittering dome above. But when moon and stars alike are
wanting, then the darkness of a Sark lane is a thing to be felt, and--if
you should happen to be a little girl of eight, with a large imagination
and sharp ears that have picked up fearsome stories of witches and
ghosts and evil spirits--to be mortally feared.

Tom had a wholesome dread of such things himself. But the fear of
fourteen, in a great strong body and no heavenly spark of imagination,
is not to be compared with the fear of eight and a mind that could
quiver like a harp even at its own imaginings. And, to compass his ends,
he would blunt his already dull feelings and turn the darkness to his
account.

When he knew Nance was out on such a night--on some errand, or in at a
neighbour's--to crouch in the hedge and leap silently out upon her was
huge delight; and it was well worth braving the grim possibilities of
the hedges in order to extort from her the anger in the bleat of terror
which, as a rule, was all that her paralysed heart permitted, as she
turned and fled.

Almost more amusing--as considerably extending the enjoyment--was it to
follow her quietly on such occasions, yet not so quietly but that she
was perfectly aware of footsteps behind, which stopped when she stopped
and went on again when she went on, and so kept her nerves on the quiver
the whole time.

Creeping fearfully along in the blackness, with eyes and ears on the
strain, and both little shoulders humped against the expected apparition
of Tom--or worse, she would become aware of the footsteps behind her.

Then she would stop suddenly to make sure, and stand listening
painfully, and hear nothing but the low hoarse growl of the sea that
rarely ceases, day or night, among the rocks of Little Sark.

Then she would take a tentative step or two and stop again, and then
dash on. And always there behind her were the footsteps that followed in
the dark.

Then she would fumble with her foot for a stone and stoop hastily--for
you are at a disadvantage with ghosts and with Toms when you stoop--and
pick it up and hurl it promiscuously in the direction of the footsteps,
and quaver, in a voice that belied its message, "Go away, Tom Hamon! I
can see you,"--which was a little white fib born of the black urgency of
the situation;--"and I'm not the least bit afraid,"--which was most
decidedly another.

And so the journey would progress fitfully and in spasms, and leave
nightmare recollections for the disturbance of one's sleep.

But there were variations in the procedure at times.

As when, on one occasion, Nance's undiscriminating projectile elicited
from the darkness a plaintive "Moo!" which came, she knew, from her
favourite calf Jeanetton, who had broken her tether in the field and
sought companionship in the road, and had followed her doubtfully,
stopping whenever she stopped, and so received the punishment intended
for another.

Nance kissed the bruise on Jeanetton's ample forehead next day very many
times, and explained the whole matter to her at considerable length, and
Jeanetton accepted it all very placidly and bore no ill-will.

Another time, when Nance had taken a very specially compounded cake over
to her old friend, Mrs. Baker, as a present from her mother, and had
been kept much longer than she wished--for the old lady's enjoyment of
her pretty ways and entertaining prattle--she set out for home in fear
and trembling.

It was one of the pitch-black nights, and she went along on tiptoes,
hugging the empty plate to her breast, and glancing fearfully over first
one shoulder, then the other, then over both and back and front all at
once.

She was almost home, and very grateful for it, when the dreaded black
figure leaped silently out at her from its crouching place, and she tore
down the lane to the house, Tom's hoarse guffaws chasing her mockingly.

The open door cleft a solid yellow wedge in the darkness. She was almost
into it, when her foot caught, and she flung head foremost into the
light with a scream, and lay there with the blood pouring down her face
from the broken plate.

A finger's-breadth lower and she would have gone through life one-eyed,
which would have been a grievous loss to humanity at large, for sweeter
windows to a large sweet soul never shone than those out of which
little Nance Hamon's looked.

Most houses may be judged by their windows, but these material windows
are not always true gauge of what is within. They may be decked to
deceive, but the clear windows of the soul admit of no disguise. That
little life tenant is always looking out and showing himself in his true
colours--whether he knows it or not.

Nance's terrified scream took old Tom out at a bound. He had heard the
quick rush of her feet and Tom's mocking laughter in the distance. He
carried Nance in to her mother, snatched up a stick, and went after the
culprit who had promptly disappeared.

It was two days before Tom sneaked in again and took his thrashing
dourly. Little Nance had shut her lips tight when her father questioned
her, and refused to say a word. But he was satisfied as to where the
blame lay and administered justice with a heavy hand.

Bernel--as soon as he grew to persecutable age--provided Tom with
another victim. But time was on the victims' side, and when Nance got to
be twelve--Bernel being then eight and Tom eighteen--their combined
energies and furies of revolt against his oppressions put matters more
on a level.

Many a pitched battle they had, and sometimes almost won. But, win or
lose, the fact that they had no longer to suffer without lifting a hand
was great gain to them, and the very fact that they had to go about
together for mutual protection knitted still stronger the ties that
bound them one to the other.

But, though little Nance's earlier years suffered much from the black
shadow of brother Tom, they were very far from being years of darkness.

She was of an unusually bright and enquiring disposition, always
wanting to see and know and understand, interested in everything about
her, and never satisfied till she had got to the bottom of things, or at
all events as far down as it was possible for a small girl to get.

Her lively chatter and ceaseless questions left her mother and Grannie
small chance of stagnation. But, if she asked many questions--and some
of them posers--it was not simply for the sake of asking, but because
she truly wanted to know; and even Grannie, who was not naturally
talkative, never resented her pertinent enquiries, but gave freely of
her accumulated wisdom and enjoyed herself in the giving.

When she got beyond their depth at times, or outside their limits, she
would boldly carry her queries--and strange ones they were at times--to
old Mr. Cachemaille, the Vicar up in Sark, making nothing of the journey
and the Coupee in order to solve some, to her, important problem. And he
not only never refused her but delighted to open to her the stores of a
well-stocked mind and of the kindest and gentlest of hearts.

Often and often the people of Vauroque and Plaisance would see them
pass, hand in hand and full of talk, when the Vicar had wished to see
with his own eyes one or other of Nance's wonderful discoveries, in the
shape of cave or rock-pool, or deposit of sparkling crystal
fingers--amethyst and topaz--or what not.

For she was ever lighting on odd and beautiful bits of Nature's
craftsmanship. Books were hardly to be had in those days, and in place
of them she climbed fearlessly about the rough cliff-sides and tumbled
headlands, and looked close at Nature with eyes that missed nothing and
craved everything.

To the neighbours the headlands were places where rabbits were to be
shot for dinner, the lower rocks places where ormers and limpets and
vraie might be found. But to little Nance the rabbits were playfellows
whose sudden deaths she lamented and resented; the cliff-sides were
glorious gardens thick with sweet-scented yellow gorse and honeysuckle
and wild roses, carpeted with primroses and bluebells; and, in their
season, rich and juicy with blackberries beyond the possibilities of
picking.

She was on closest visiting terms with innumerable broods of
newly-hatched birdlings--knew them, indeed, while they were still but
eggs--delighted in them when they were as yet but skin and
mouth--rejoiced in their featherings and flyings. Even baby cuckoos were
a joy to her, though, on their foster-mothers' accounts she resented the
thriftlessness of their parents, and grew tired each year of their
monotonous call which ceased not day or night. But of the larks never,
for their songs seemed to her of heaven, while the cuckoos were of
earth. The gulls, too, were somewhat difficult from the friendly point
of view, but she lay for hours overlooking their domestic arrangements
and envying the wonders of their matchless flight.

And down below the cliffs what marvels she discovered!--marvels which in
many cases the Vicar was fain to content himself with at second hand,
since closer acquaintance seemed to him to involve undoubted risk to
limb if not to life. Little Nance, indeed, hopped down the seamed cliffs
like a rock pipit, with never a thought of the dangers of the passage,
and he would stand and watch her with his heart in his mouth, and only
shake his grey head at her encouraging assertions that it was truly
truly as easy as easy. For he felt certain that even if he got down he
would never get up again. And so, when the triumphant shout from below
told him she was safely landed, he would wave a grateful hand and get
back from the edge and seat himself securely on a rock, till the rosy
face came laughing up between him and the shimmering sea, with trophy of
weed or shell or crystal quartz, and he would tell her all he knew about
them, and she would try to tell him of all he had missed by not coming
down.

There were wonderful great basins down there, all lined with pink and
green corallines, and full of the loveliest weeds and anemones and other
sea-flowers, and the rivulets that flowed from them to the sea were
lined pink and green, too. And this that she had brought him was the
flaming sea-weed, though truly it did not look it now, but in the water
it was, she assured him, of the loveliest, and there were great bunches
there so that the dark holes under the rocks were all alight with it.

She coaxed him doubtfully to the descent of the rounded headland facing
L'Etat, picking out an easy circuitous way for him, and so got him
safely down to her own special pool, hollowed out of the solid granite
by centuries of patient grinding on the part of the great boulders
within.

It was there, peering down at the fishes below, that she expressed a
wish to imitate them; and he agreeing, she ran up to the farm for a bit
of rope and was back before he had half comprehended all the beauties of
the pool. And he had no sooner explained the necessary movements to her
and she had tried them, than she cast off the rope, shouting, "I can
swim! I can swim!" and to his amazement swam across the pool and back--a
good fifty feet each way--chirping with delight in this new-found
faculty and the tonic kiss of the finest water in the world. But after
all it was not so very amazing, for she was absolutely without fear, and
in that water it is difficult to sink.

They were often down there together after that, for close alongside were
wonderful channels and basins whorled out of the rock in the most
fantastic ways, and to sit and watch the tide rush up them was a
never-failing entertainment.

And not far away was a blow-hole of the most extraordinary which shot
its spray a hundred feet into the air, and if you didn't mind getting
wet you could sit quite alongside it, so close that you could put your
hand into it as it came rocketing out of the hole, and then, if the sun
was right, you sat in the midst of rainbows--a thing Nance had always
longed to do since she clapped her baby hands at her first one. But the
Vicar never did that.

And once, in quest of the how and the why, Nance swam into the
blow-hole's cave at a very low tide, and its size and the dome of its
roof, compared with the narrowness of its entrance, amazed her, but she
did not stay long for it gave her the creeps.

These were some of the ways by which little Nance grew to a larger
estate than most of her fellows, and all these things helped to make her
what she came to be.

When she grew old enough to assist in the farm, new realms of delight
opened to her. Chickens, calves, lambs, piglets--she foster-mothered
them all and knew no weariness in all such duties which were rather
pleasures.

It was a wounded rabbit, limping into cover under a tangle of gorse and
blackberry bashes, that discovered to her the entrance to the series of
little chambers and passages that led right through the headland to the
side looking into Port Gorey. Which most satisfactory hiding-place she
and Bernel turned to good account on many an occasion when brother Tom's
oppression passed endurance.

It had taken time, and much screwing up of childish courage, to explore
the whole of that extraordinary little burrow, and it was not the work
of a day.

When Nance crept along the little run made by many generations of
rabbits, she found that it led finally into a dark crack in the rock,
and, squeezing through that, she was in a small dark chamber which smelt
strongly of her friends.

As soon as her eyes recovered from the sudden change from blazing
sunlight to almost pitch darkness, she perceived a small black opening
at the far end, and looking through it she saw a lightening of the
darkness still farther in which tempted her on.

It was a tough scramble even for her, and the closeness of the rocks and
the loneliness weighed upon her somewhat. But there was that glimmer of
light ahead and she must know what it was, and so she climbed and
wriggled over and under the huge splintered rocks till she came to the
light, like a tiny slit of a window far above her head, and still there
were passages leading on.

Next day, with Bernel and a tiny crasset lamp for company, she explored
the burrow to its utmost limits and adopted it at once as their refuge
and stronghold. And thereafter they spent much time there, especially in
the end chamber where a tiny slit gave on to Port Gorey, and they could
lie and watch all that went on down below.

There they solemnly concocted plans for brother Tom's discomfiture, and
thither they retreated after defeat or victory, while he hunted high
and low for them and never could make out where they had got to.

Then Tom went off to sea, and life, for those at home, became a joy
without a flaw--except the thought that he would sometime come
back--unless he got drowned.

When he returned he was past the boyish bullying and teasing stage, and
his stunts and twists developed themselves along other lines. Moreover,
sailor-fashion, he wore a knife in a sheath at the back of his belt.

He found Nance a tall slim girl of sixteen, her childish prettiness just
beginning to fashion itself into the strength and comeliness of form and
feature which distinguished her later on.

He swore, with strange oaths, that she was the prettiest bit of goods
he'd set eyes on since he left home, and he'd seen a many. And he
wondered to himself if this could really be the Nance he used to hate
and persecute.

But Nance detested him and all his ways as of old.




CHAPTER III

HOW THE NEW MINE CAPTAIN CAME


Tom Hamon and Peter Mauger seated themselves on a rock within a few feet
of the narrow slit out of which Nance and Bernel had been looking.

"Ouaie," said Tom, taking up his parable--"wanted me to join him in
getting a loan on farm, he did."

"Aw, now!"

"Ouaie--a loan on farm, and me to join him, 'cause he couldn' do it
without. 'And why?' I asked him."

"Ah!"

"An' he told me he was goin' to make a fortune out them silver mines."

"Aw!"

"Ouaie! He'd put in every pound he had and every shilling he earned. An'
the more he could put in the more he would get out."

"Aw!"

"'But,' I said, 'suppos'n it all goes into them big holes and never
comes out--'"

"Aw!"

"But he's just crazy 'bout them mines. Says there's silver an' lead, and
guyabble-knows-what-all in 'em, and when they get it out he'll be a rich
man."

"Aw!" said Peter, nodding his head portentously, as one who had gauged
the futility of earthly riches.

He was a young man of large possessions but very few words. When he did
allow his thoughts out they came slowly and in jerks, with lapses at
times which the hearer had to fill in as best he could.

His father had been an enterprising free-trader, and had made money
before the family farm came to him on the death of his father. He had
married another farm and the heiress attached to it, and Peter was the
result. An only son, both parents dead, two farms and a good round sum
in the Guernsey Bank, such were Peter's circumstances.

And himself--good-tempered; lazy, since he had no need to work; not
naturally gifted mentally, and the little he had, barely stirred by the
short course of schooling which had been deemed sufficient for so
worldly-well-endowed a boy; tall, loose-limbed, easy going and easily
led, Peter was the object of much speculation among marriageably
inclined maiden hearts, and had set his own where it was not wanted.

"Ouaie," continued Tom, "an' if I'd join him in the loan the money'd all
come to me when he'd done with it."

"Aw!... Money isn't everything.... Can't get all you want sometimes
when you've got all money you want."

"G'zammin, Peter! You're as crazy 'bout that lass as th' old un is 'bout
his mines. Why don't ye ask her and ha' done with it?"

"Aw--yes. Well.... You see.... I'm makin' up to her gradual like, and in
time----"

And Bernel in the hole dug his elbow facetiously into Nance's side.

"Mon Gyu! To think of a slip of a thing like our Nance making a great
big fellow like you as fool-soft as a bit of tallow!" and Tom stared at
him in amazement. "Why, I've licked her scores of times, and I used to
lift her up by the hair of her head."

"I'd ha' knocked your head right off, Tom Hamon, if I'd been there.
Right off--yes, an' bumped it on the ground."

"No, you wouldn't. 'Cause, in the first place, you couldn't, and in the
second place you wouldn't have looked at her then. She was no more to
look at than a bit of a rabbit, slipping about, scared-like, with her
big eyes all round her."

"Great rough bull of a chap you was, Tom. Ought to had more lickings
when you was young."

"Aw!" said Tom.

"Join him?" asked Peter after a pause.

"No, I won't, an' he's no right to ask it, an' he knows it. Them dirty
mines may pay an' they may not, but the farm's a safe thing an' I'll
stick to it."

"Maybe new capt'n'll make things go better. That's him, I'm thinking,
just got ashore from brig without breaking his legs," nodding towards
the wooden landing-stage on the other side of the gulf. For landing at
Port Gorey was at times a matter requiring both nerve and muscle.

A man, however, had just leaped ashore from the brig, and was now
standing looking somewhat anxiously after the landing of his baggage,
which consisted of a wooden chest and an old carpet-bag.

When at last it stood safely on the platform, he cast a comprehensive
look at his surroundings and then turned to the group of men who had
come down to watch the boat come in, and four pairs of eyes on the
opposite side of the gulf watched him curiously, with little thought of
the tremendous part he was to play in all their lives.

"Where's he stop?" asked Peter.

"Our house."

"Nay!"

"Ouaie, I tell you. He's to stop at our house."

"Why doesn't he go to Barracks?"

"Old Captain's there and they might not agree. Oh ouaie, he'll have his
hands full, I'm thinking. And if he's not careful it's a crack on the
head and a drop over the Coupee he'll be getting."

"Ah!" said Peter Mauger.

"Come you along and see what kind of chap he is."

"Aw well, I don't mind," and they strolled away to inspect the new Mine
Captain, who was to brace up the slackened ropes and bring the
enterprise to a successful issue.

"Did you know he was going to stop with us, Nance?" asked Bernel, as
they groped their way out after due interval.

"I heard father tell mother this morning."

"Where's he to sleep?"

"He's to have my room and I'm coming up into the loft. I shall take the
dark end, and I've put up a curtain across."

"Shoo! We'll hear enough about the mines now," and they crept out behind
a gorse bush, and went off across the common towards the clump of
wind-whipped trees inside which the houses of Little Sark clustered for
companionship and shelter from the south-west gales.




CHAPTER IV

HOW GARD MADE NEW ACQUAINTANCES


Old Tom Hamon gave the new arrival warm greeting, and pointed out such
matters as might interest him as they climbed the steep road which led
up to the plateau and the houses.

"Assay Office, Mr. Gard.... Captain's Office.... Forge.... Sark's Hope
shaft.... Le Pelley shaft--ninety fathoms below sea-level.... Pump
shaft ... and yon to east'ard is Prince's shaft.... We go round here
behind engine-house.... Yon's my house 'mong the trees."

"That's a fine animal," said Gard, stopping suddenly to look at a great
white horse, which stood nibbling the gorse on the edge of the cliff
right in the eye of the sun, as it drooped towards Guernsey in a
holocaust of purple and amber and crimson clouds. The glow of the
threatening sky threw the great white figure into unusual prominence.

"Yours, Mr. Hamon?" asked Gard--and the white horse flung up its head
and pealed out a trumpet-like neigh as though resenting the imputation.

"No," said old Tom, staring at the white horse under his shading hand.
"Seigneur's. What's he doing down here? He's generally kept up at
Eperquerie, and that's the best place for him. He's an awkward beast at
times. I must send and tell Mr. Le Pelley where he is."

The little cluster of white, thatched houses stood close together for
company, but discreetly turned their faces away from one another so that
no man overlooked or interfered with his neighbour.

Gard found himself in a large room which occupied the whole middle
portion of the house and served as kitchen and common room for the
family.

The floor was of trodden earth--hard and dry as cement, with a strip of
boarding round the sides and in front of the fire-place. Heavy oaken
beams ran across the roof from which depended a great hanging rack
littered with all kinds of household odds and ends. Along the beams of
the roof on hooks hung two long guns. One end of the room was occupied
by a huge fire-place, in one corner of which stood a new iron cooking
range, and alongside it a heap of white ashes and some smouldering
sticks of gorse under a big black iron pot filled the room with the
fragrance of wood smoke. In the opposite side of the fire-place was an
iron door closing the great baking oven, and above it ran a wide
mantel-shelf on which stood china dogs and glass rolling-pins and a
couple of lamps.

A well-scrubbed white wooden table was set ready for supper. On a very
ancient-looking black oak stand--cupboard below and shelves above--was
ranged a vast assortment of crockery ware, and on the walls hung
potbellied metal jugs and cans which shone like silver.

Two doors led to the other rooms of the house, one of them wide open.

One corner of the room was occupied by a great wooden bin eight feet
square, filled with dried bracken. On the wide flat side, which looked
like a form, a woman and a girl were sitting when the two men entered.

Hamon introduced them briefly as his wife and daughter, and, comely
women as Gard had been accustomed to in his own country of Cornwall,
there was something about these two, and especially about the younger of
the two, which made him of a sudden more than satisfied with the
somewhat doubtful venture to which he had bound himself--set a sudden
homely warmth in his heart, and made him feel the richer for being
there--made him, in fact, glad that he had come.

And yet there was nothing in their reception of him that justified the
feeling.

They nodded, indeed, in answer to his bow, but neither their faces nor
their manner showed any special joy at his coming.

But that made no difference to him. They were there, and the mere sight
of the girl's fine mobile face and large dark blue eyes was a thing to
be grateful for.

"You'll be wanting your supper," said Hamon.

"At your own time, please," said the young man, looking towards Mrs.
Hamon. "I am really not very hungry"--though truth to tell he well might
have been, for the food on the brig had left much to be desired even to
one who had been a sailorman himself.

"It is our usual time," said Mrs. Hamon, "and it is all ready. Will you
please to sit there."

At the sound of the chairs a boy of fourteen came quietly in and slipped
into his seat.

His sister had gone off with a portion on a plate through the open door.

Gard was surprised to find himself hoping it was not her custom to take
her meals in private, and was relieved when she came back presently
without the plate and sat down by her brother.

"Ah, you, Bernel, as soon as you've done your supper run over and tell
Mr. Le Pelley that his white stallion is on our common, and he'd better
send for him."

"I'll ride him home," said the boy exultingly.

"No you won't, Bern," said his sister quickly. "He's not safe. You know
what an awkward beast he is at times, and you could never get him across
the Coupee."

"Pooh! I'd ride him across any day."

"Promise me you won't," she said, with a hand on his arm.

"Oh, well, if you say so," he grumbled. "I could manage him all right
though."

Just then the doorway darkened and two young men entered, and threw
their caps on the green bed, and sat down with an awkward nod of
greeting to the company in general.

"My son Tom," said Mr. Hamon, and Tom jerked another awkward nod towards
the stranger. "And Peter Mauger"--Peter repeated the performance, more
shyly and awkwardly even than Tom, from a variety of reasons.

Tom was at home, and he had not even been invited--except by Tom. And
strangers always made him shy. And then there was Nance, with her great
eyes fixed on him, he knew, though he had not dared to look straight at
her.

And then the stranger had an air about him--it was hard to say of what,
but it made Peter Mauger and Tom conscious of personal uncouthness, and
of a desire to get up and go out and wash their hands and have a shave.

Gard, they knew, was the new captain of the mine, chosen by the
managers of the company for his experience with men, and he looked as if
he had been accustomed to order them about.

His eyes were dark and keen, his face full of energy. Being clean-shaven
his age was doubtful. He might be twenty-five or forty. Nance, in her
first quick comprehensive glance, had wondered which.

He stood close upon six feet and was broad-chested and
square-shouldered. A good figure of a man, clean and upstanding, and
with no nonsense about him. A capable-looking man in every respect, and
if his manner was quiet and retiring, there was that about him which
suggested the possibility of explosion if occasion arose.

Not that the Hamon family as a whole, or any member of it, would have
put the matter quite in that way to itself, or herself. But that,
vaguely, was the impression produced upon them--an impression of
uprightness, intelligence, and reserved strength--and the more strongly,
perhaps, because of late these characteristics had been somewhat
overshadowed in the Island by the greed of gain and love of display
engendered by the opening of the mines.

To old Tom Hamon his coming was wholly welcome. It foreshadowed a strong
and more energetic development of the mines and the speedier realization
of his most earnest desires.

To Mrs. Hamon it meant some extra household work, which she would gladly
undertake since it was her husband's wish to have the stranger live with
them, though in his absorption by the mines she had no sympathy
whatever.

Nance looked upon him merely as a part of the mines, and therefore to
be detested along with the noisy engine-house, the pumps, the damp and
dirty miners, and all the rest of it--the coming of which had so
completely spoiled her much-loved Sark.

Tom disliked him because he made him feel small and boorish, and of a
commoner make. And feelings such as that inevitably try to disprove
themselves by noisy self-assertion.

Accordingly Tom--after various jocular remarks in patois to Peter, who
would have laughed at them had he dared, but, knowing Nance's feelings
towards her brother was not sure how she would take it--loudly and
provocatively to Gard--

"Expect to make them mines pay, monsieur?"

"Well, I hope so. But it's too soon to express an opinion till I've seen
them."

"They put a lot of money in, and they get a lot of dirt out, but one
does not hear much of any silver."

"Sometimes the deepest mines prove the best in the end."

"And as long as there's anybody to pay for it I suppose you go on
digging."

"If I thought the mines had petered out--"

"Eh?" said Peter, and then coughed to hide his confusion when they all
looked at him.

"I should of course advise the owners to stop work and sink no more
money."

"It'll be a bad day for Sark when that happens," said old Tom. "But it's
not going to happen. The silver's there all right. It only wants getting
out."

"If it's there we'll certainly get it out," said Gard, and although he
said it quietly enough, old Tom felt much better about things in
general.

"You're the man for us," he said heartily. "We'll all be rich before we
die yet."

"Depends when we die," growled Tom--in which observation--obvious as it
was--there was undoubtedly much truth. And then, his little suggestion
of provocation having broken like ripples on Gard's imperturbability, he
turned on Peter and tried to stir him up.

"You don't get on any too fast with your making up to la garche, mon
gars," he said in the patois again.

"Aw--Tom!" remonstrated Peter, very red in the face at this ruthless
laying bare of his approaches.

"Get ahead, man! Put your arm round her neck and give her a kiss. That's
the way to fetch 'em."

At which Nance jumped up with fiery face and sparks in her eyes and left
the room, and Gard, who understood no word of what had passed, yet
understood without possibility of doubt that Tom's speech had been
mortally offensive to his sister, and set him down in his own mind as of
low esteem and boorish disposition.

As for Peter, to whom such advice was as useless as the act would have
been impossible at that stage of the proceedings, he was almost as much
upset as Nance herself. He got up with a shamefaced--

"Aw, Tom, boy, that was not good of you," and made for his hat, while
Tom sat with a broad grin at the result of his delicate diplomacy, and
Gard's great regret was that it was not possible for him to take the
hulking fellow by the neck and bundle him out of doors.

Old Tom made some sharp remark to his son, who replied in kind; Mrs.
Hamon sat quietly aloof, as she always did when Tom and his father got
to words, and Bernel made play with his supper, as though such matters
were of too common occurrence to call for any special attention on his
part.

Then Nance's face framed in a black sun-bonnet gleamed in at the outer
door.

"Come along, Bern, and we'll go and tell the Seigneur where his white
horse is," and she disappeared, and Bernel, having polished off
everything within reach, got up and followed her.

"Will you please to take a look at the mines to-night?" asked old Tom of
his guest, anxious to interest him in the work as speedily as possible.

"We might take a bit of a walk, and you can tell me all you will about
things. But I don't take hold till the first of the month, and I don't
want to interfere until I have a right to. I suppose my baggage will be
coming up?"

"Ach, yes! Tom, you take the cart and bring Mr. Gard's things up. They
are lying on the quay down there. Then we will go along, if you please!"

Old Tom marched him through the wonderful amber twilight to the summit
of the bluff behind the engine-house--whence Gard could just make out
his box and carpet-bag still lying on the quay below. And all the way
the old man was volubly explaining the many changes necessary, in his
opinion, to bring the business to a paying basis. All which information
Gard accepted for testing purposes, but gathered from the total the fact
that through ill health on the part of the departing captain, the ropes
all round had got slack and that the tightening of them would be a
matter of no little delicacy and difficulty.

Sark men, Mr. Hamon explained, were very free and independent, and hated
to be driven. They did piecework--so much per fathom, and were
constitutionally, he admitted, a bit more particular as to the so much
than as to the fathom. While the Cornish and Welsh men, receiving weekly
wages, had also grown slack and did far less work than they did at first
and than they might, could, and should do.

"But," said old Tom frankly, scratching his head, "I don't know's I'd
like the job myself. Your men are quiet enough to look at, but they can
boil over when they're put to it. And our men--well, they're Sark, and
there's more'n a bit of the devil in them."

"I must get things round bit by bit," said Gard quietly. "It never pays
to make a fuss and bustle men. Softly does it."

"I'm thinking you can do it if any man can."

"I'll have a good try any way."

"Whereabouts does the Seigneur live?" he asked presently, and
inconsequently as it seemed, but following out a train of thought of his
own which needed no guessing at.

"The Seigneur? Over there in Sark--across the Coupee."

"What's the Coupee?"

"The Coupee?--Mon Gyu!"--at such colossal ignorance--"Why, ...the
Coupee's the Coupee.... Come along, then. Maybe you can get a look at it
before it's too dark."

They had got quite out of sound of the clanking engine, and were
travelling a well-made road, when their attention was drawn to a lively
struggle proceeding on the common between the road and the cliff.

Tom, setting out after the troubled Peter, had caught sight of the
Seigneur's white horse and had forthwith decided to take him home.
Peter, agreeing that it was a piece of neighbourliness which the
Seigneur would appreciate, had turned back to give his assistance.

By some cajolery they had managed to slip a halter with a special length
of rope over the wary white head, and there for the moment matters hung.
For the white horse, with his forelegs firmly planted, dragged at one
end of the rope and the two men at the other, and the issue remained in
doubt.

The doubt, however, was suddenly solved by the white horse deciding on
more active measures. He swung his great head to one side, dragged the
men off their feet and started off at a gallop, they hanging on as best
they could.

Old Tom and Gard set off after them to see the end of the matter, and
suddenly, as the roadway dipped between high banks and became a hollow
way, the white beast gave a shrill squeal, flung up his heels, jerked
himself free, and vanished like a streak of light into the darkness of
the lofty bank in front.

"Mon Gyu!" cried old Tom, and sped up the bank to see the end.

But the white horse knew his way and had no fear. They were just in time
to hear the rattle of his hoofs, as he disappeared with a final shrill
defiance into the outer darkness on the further side of a mighty gulf,
while a stone dislodged by his flying feet went clattering down into
invisible depths.

"He's done it," panted old Tom, while Gard gazed with something like awe
at the narrow pathway, wavering across from side to side of the great
abyss, out of which rose the growl of the sea.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Coupee. It's a wonder he managed it. The path slipped in the winter
and it's narrow in places."

"And do people cross it in the dark?" asked Gard, thinking of the girl
and boy who had gone to see the Seigneur.

"Och yes! It is not bad when you're used to it. Come and see!" and he
led the way back across the common to the road.

Gard walked cautiously behind him as he went across the crumbling white
pathway with the carelessness of custom, and, sailor as he had been, he
was not sorry when the other side was reached, and he could stand in the
security of the cutting and look back, and down into the gulf where the
white waves foamed and growled among the boulders three hundred feet
below.

"I've seen a many as did not care to cross that, first time they saw
it," said old Tom with a chuckle.

"Well, I'm not surprised at that. It's apt to make one's head spin."

"I brought captain of brig up here and he wouldn't put a foot on it. Not
for five hundred pounds, he said."

"It would have taken more than five hundred pounds to piece him together
if he'd tumbled down there."

"That's so."

A young moon, and a clear sky still rarely light and lofty in the amber
after-glow, gave them a safe passage back.

When they reached the house among the trees, Gard bethought him of his
belongings.

"And my things from the quay?" he suggested.

"G'zammin! That boy has forgotten all about them, I'll be bound. I'll
take the cart down myself."

"I'll go with you."

When they got back with the box and bag, which no one had touched since
they were dropped on to the platform four hours before, they found that
Nance and Bernel had got home and gone off to bed, having taken
advantage of being across in Sark to call on some of their friends
there.

Gard wondered how they would have fared if they had happened to be on
the Coupee when the white horse went thundering across.

He dreamed that night that he was cautiously treading an endless white
path that swung up and down in the darkness like a piece of ribbon in a
breeze. And a great white horse came plunging at him out of the
darkness, and just as he gave himself up for lost, a sweet firm face in
a black sun-bonnet appeared suddenly in front of him, and the white
horse squealed and leaped over them and disappeared, while the stones he
had displaced went rattling down into the depths below.




CHAPTER V

HOW NANCE SHONE THROUGH HER MODEST VEILING


As soon as the old captain's time was up, Gard took up his work in the
mines with energetic hopefulness.

His hopefulness was unbounded. His energy he tempered with all the tact
and discretion his knowledge of men, and his experience in handling
them, had taught him.

His father had been lost at sea the year after his son was born. His
mother, a good and God-fearing woman, had strained every nerve to give
her boy an education. She died when Stephen was fourteen. He took to his
father's calling and had followed it with a certain success for ten
years, by which time he had attained the position of first mate.

Then the owner of the Botallack Mine, in Cornwall, having come across
him in the way of business, and been struck by his intelligence and
aptitude, induced him by a lucrative appointment to try his luck on
land.

The managers of the Sark Mines, seeking a special man for somewhat
special circumstances, had applied to Botallack for assistance, and
Stephen Gard came to Sark as the representative of many hopes which, so
far, had been somewhat lacking in results.

But, as old Tom Hamon had predicted, he very soon found that he had laid
his hand to no easy plough.

The Sark men were characteristically difficult, and made the difficulty
greater by not understanding him--or declining to understand, which came
to the same thing--when he laid down his ideas and endeavoured to bring
them to his ways.

Some, without doubt, had no English, and their patois was quite beyond
him. Others could understand him an they would, but deliberately chose
not to--partly from a conservative objection to any change whatever, and
partly from an idea that he had been imported for the purpose of driving
them, and driving is the last thing a Sark man will submit to.

Old Tom Hamon, and a few others who had a financial interest in the
mines, assisted him all they could, in hopes of thereby assisting
themselves, but they were few.

As for the Cornishmen and Welshmen, the success or failure of the Sark
Mines mattered little to them. There was always mining going on
somewhere and competent men were always in demand. They were paid so
much a week, small output or large, and without a doubt the small output
entailed less labour than the large. They naturally regarded with no
great favour the man whose present aim in life it was to ensure the
largest output possible.

And so Gard found himself confronted by many difficulties, and,
moreover, and greatly to the troubling of his mind, found himself looked
upon as a dictator and an interloper by the men whom he had hoped to
benefit.

Concerning the mines themselves he was not called upon for an opinion.
The managers had satisfied themselves as to the presence of silver. If
his opinion had been asked it would have confirmed them. But all he had
to do was to follow the veins and win the ore in paying quantities, and
he found himself handicapped on every hand by the obstinacy of his men.

Outside business matters he was very well satisfied with his
surroundings.

In such spare time as he had, he wandered over the Island with eager,
open eyes, marvelling at its wonders and enjoying its natural beauties
with rare delight.

The great granite cliffs, with their deep indentations and stimulating
caves and crannies; the shimmering blue and green sea, with its long
slow heave which rushed in foam and tumult up the rock-pools and
gullies; the softer beauties of rounded down and flower-and fern-clad
slopes honeycombed with rabbit holes; the little sea-gardens teeming
with novel life; in all these he found his resource and a certain
consolation for his loneliness.

And in the Hamon household he found much to interest him and not a
little ground for speculation.

Old Mrs. Hamon--Grannie--had promptly ordered him in for inspection,
and, after prolonged and careful observation from the interior of the
black sun-bonnet, had been understood to approve him, since she said
nothing to the contrary.

It took him some time to arrive at the correct relationship between
young Tom and Nance and Bernel, for it seemed quite incredible that
fruit so diverse should spring from one parent stem.

For Tom was all that was rough and boorish--rude to Mrs. Hamon, coarse,
and at times overbearing to Nance and Bernel, to such an extent, indeed,
that more than once Gard had difficulty in remembering that he himself
was only a visitor on sufferance and not entitled to interfere in such
intimate family matters.

Tom was not slow to perceive this, and in consequence set himself
deliberately to provoke it by behaviour even more outrageous than usual.
Time and again Gard would have rejoiced to take him outside and express
his feelings to their fullest satisfaction.

With Mrs. Hamon and Bernel he was on the most friendly footing, his
undisguised sentiments in the matter of Tom commending him to them
decisively.

But with Nance he made no headway whatever.

It was an absolutely new sensation to him, and a satisfaction the
meaning of which he had not yet fully gauged, to be living under the
same roof with a girl such as this. He found himself listening for her
voice outside and the sound of her feet, and learned almost at once to
distinguish between the clatter of her wooden pattens and any one else's
when she was busy in the yard or barns.

Even though she held him at coolest arm's length, and repelled any
slightest attempt at abridgment of the distance, he still rejoiced in
the sight of her and found the world good because of her presence in it.

He did not understand her feeling about him in the least. He did not
know that she had had to give up her room for him--that she detested the
mines and everything tainted by them, and himself as head and forefront
of the offence--that she regarded him as an outsider and a foreigner and
therefore quite out of place in Sark. He only knew that he saw very
little of her and would have liked to see a great deal more.

The very reserve of her treatment of himself--one might even say her
passive endurance of him--served but to stimulate within him the wish to
overcome it. The attraction of indifference is a distinct force in life.

There was something so trim and neat and altogether captivating to him
in the slim energetic figure, in its short blue skirts and print jacket,
as it whisked to and fro, inside and out, on its multifarious duties,
and still more in the sweet, serious face, glimmering coyly in the
shadow of the great sun-bonnet and always moulded to a fine, but, as it
seemed to him, a somewhat unnatural gravity in his company.

And yet he was quite sure she could be very much otherwise when she
would. For he had heard her singing over her work, and laughing merrily
with Bernel; and her face, sweet as it was in its repression, seemed to
him more fitted for smiles and laughter and joyousness.

He saw, of course, that brother Tom was a constant source of annoyance
to them all, but especially to her, and his blood boiled impotently on
her account.

He carried with him--as a delightful memory of her, though not without
its cloud--the pretty picture she made when he came upon her one day in
the orchard, milking--for, strictly as the Sabbath may be observed, cows
must still be milked on a Sunday, not being endowed manna-like, with the
gift of miraculous double production on a Saturday.

Her head was pressed into her favourite beast's side, and she was
crooning soothingly to it as the white jets ping-panged into the
frothing pail, and he stood for a moment watching her unseen.

Then the cow slowly turned her head towards him, considered him gravely
for a moment, decided he was unnecessary and whisked her tail
impatiently. Nance's lullaby stopped, she looked round with a reproving
frown, and he went silently on his way.

It was another Sunday afternoon that, as he lay in the bracken on the
slope of a headland, he saw two slim figures racing down a bare slope on
the opposite side of a wide blue gulf, with joyous chatter, and
recognized Nance and Bernel.

They disappeared and he felt lonely. Then they came picking their way
round a black spur below, and stood for a minute or two looking down at
something beneath them. Which something he presently discovered must be
a pool of size among the rocks, for after a brief retiral, Nance behind
a boulder and Bernel into a black hollow, they came out again, she
lightly clad in fluttering white and Bernel in nothing at all, and with
a shout of delight dived out of sight into the pool below.

He could hear their shouts and laughter echoed back by the huge
overhanging rocks. He saw them climb out again and sit sunning
themselves on the grey ledge like a pair of sea-birds, and Nance's
exiguous white garment no longer fluttered in the breeze.

Then in they went again, and again, and again, till, tiring of the
limits of the pool--huge as he afterwards found it to be--they crept
over the barnacled rocks to the sea, and flung themselves fearlessly in,
and came ploughing through it towards his headland. And he shrank still
lower among the bracken, for though he had watched the distant little
figure in white with a slight sense of sacrilege, and absolutely no
sense of impropriety but only of enjoyment, he would not for all he was
worth have had her know that he had watched at all, since he could
imagine how she would resent it.

Nevertheless, these unconscious revelations of her real self were to him
as jewels of price, and he treasured the memory of them accordingly.

He watched them swim back and disappear among the rocks, and presently
go merrily up the bare slope again; and he lay long in the bracken,
scarce daring to move, and when he did, he crept away warily, as one
guilty of a trespass.

And glad he was that he had done so, for he had proof of her feeling
that same night at supper.

Peter Mauger came sheepishly in again with Tom, and Tom, when he had
satisfied the edge of his hunger, must wax facetious in his brotherly
way.

"Peter and me was sitting among the rocks over against big pool
s'afternoon and we saw things"--with a grin.

"Aw, Tom!" deprecated Peter in red confusion.

"An' Peter, he said he never seen anything so pretty in all his life
as--"

"Aw now, Tom, you're a liar! I never said anything about it."

"You thought it, or your face was liar too, my boy. Like a dog after a
rabbit it was."

"It was just like you both to lie watching," flamed Nance. "If you'd
both go and jump into the sea every day you'd be a great deal nicer than
you are; and if you'd stop there it would be a great deal nicer for us."

"Aw--Nance!" from Peter, and a great guffaw from Tom, while Gard devoted
himself guiltily to his plate.

"You looked nice before you went in," chuckled Tom, who never knew when
to stop, "but you looked a sight nicer when you came out and sat on
rocks with it all stuck to you--"

"You're a--a--a disgusting thing, Tom Hamon, and you're just as bad,
Peter Mauger!" and she looked as if she would have flown at them, but,
instead, jumped up and flung out of the room.

Gard's innate honesty would not permit him to take up the cudgels this
time. Inwardly he felt himself involved in her condemnation, though none
but himself knew it.

But he had taken at times to glowering at Tom, when his rudeness passed
bounds, in a way which made that young man at once uncomfortable and
angry, and at times provoked him to clownish attempts at reprisal.

Mrs. Hamon bore with the black sheep quietly, since nothing else was
possible to her, though her annoyance and distress were visible enough.

Old Tom was completely obsessed with his visions of wealth ever just
beyond the point of his pick. He toiled long hours in the damp
darknesses below seas, with the sounds of crashing waves and rolling
boulders close above him, and at times threateningly audible through the
stratum of rocks between; and when he did appear at meals he was too
weary to trouble about anything beyond the immediate satisfaction of his
needs. Besides, young Tom had long since proved his strength equal to
his father's, and remonstrance or rebuke would have produced no effect.

As to Bernel, he was only a boy as yet, but he was Nance's boy and all
she would have wished him.

In time he would grow up and be a match for Tom, and meanwhile she would
see to it that he grew up as different from Tom in every respect as it
was possible for a boy to be.




CHAPTER VI

HOW GRANNIE SCHEMED SCHEMES


Stephen Gard's experience of women had been small.

His mother had been everything to him till she died, when he was
fourteen, and he went to sea.

When she was gone, that which she had put into him remained, and kept
him clear of many of the snares to which the life of the young sailorman
is peculiarly liable.

When he attained a position of responsibility he had had no time for
anything else. And so, of his own experience, he knew little of women
and their ways.

Less, indeed, than Nance knew of men and their ways. And that was not
very much and tended chiefly to scorn and dissatisfaction, seeing that
her knowledge was gleaned almost entirely from her experiences of Tom
and Peter Mauger. Her father was, of course, her father, and on somewhat
of a different plane from other men.

And so, if Nance was a wonder and a revelation to Gard, Gard was no less
of, at all events, a novelty in the way of mankind to Nance.

His quiet bearing and good manners, after a life-long course of Tom, had
a distinct attraction for her.

That he could burst into flame if occasion required, she was convinced.
For, more than once, out of the corner of her eye and round the edge of
her sun-bonnet, she had caught his thunderous looks of disgust at some
of Tom's carryings-on.

She would, perhaps, have been ashamed to confess it but, somewhere down
in her heart, she rather hoped, sooner or later, to see his lightning as
well. It would be worth seeing, and she was inclined to think it would
be good for Tom--and the rest of the family.

For Gard looked as if he could give a good account of himself in case of
need. His well-built, tight-knit figure gave one the impression that he
was even stronger than he looked.

If only he had been a Sark man and had nothing to do with those horrid
mines! But all her greatest dislikes met in him, and she could not bring
herself to the point of relaxing one iota in these matters of which he
was unfortunately and unconsciously guilty.

The state of affairs at the mines improved not one whit as the months
dragged on. There was a smouldering core of discontent which might break
into flame at any moment--or into disastrous explosion if the necessary
element were added.

Old Tom did his best, and stood loyally by the new captain and the
interests of the mine and himself. But he was in a minority and could so
far do no more than oppose vehement talk to vehement talk, and that, as
a rule, is much like pouring oil on roaring flames.

Not many of those who were shareholders in the mine were also workers in
it, and the workers met constantly at the house of a neighbour, who had
turned his kitchen to an undomestic but profitable purpose by supplying
drink to the miners at what seemed to the English and Welshmen
ridiculously low prices.

In that kitchen the new captain and his new methods were vehemently
discussed and handled roughly enough--in words. And hot words and the
thoughts they excite, and wild thoughts and the words they find vent in,
are at times the breeders of deeds that were better left undone.

To all financially interested in the mines the need for strictest
economy and fullest efficiency was patent enough. It was still a case of
faith and hope--a case of continual putting in of work and money, and,
so far, of getting little out--except the dross which intervened between
them and their highest hopes.

There was silver there without a doubt, and the many thin veins they
came across lured them on with constant hope of mighty pockets and
deposits of which these were but the flying indications.

And all putting in and getting nothing out results in stressful times,
in business ventures as in the case of individuals. The great shafts
sank deeper and deeper, the galleries branched out far under the sea,
and there was a constant call for more and more money, lest that already
sunk should be lost.

Mr. Hamon, disappointed in his view of raising money on the farm by
Tom's obstinacy, in the bitterness of his spirit and the urgent
necessities of the mines, conceived a new idea which, if he was able to
carry it out, would serve the double purpose of satisfying his own needs
at the recalcitrant Tom's expense.

"I must have more money for the mines," he said to his wife one day in
private. "I'm thinking of selling the farm."

"Selling the farm?" gasped Mrs. Hamon, doubtful of her own hearing. For
selling the farm is the very last resource of the utterly unfortunate.
"Aye, selling the farm. Why not? It'll all come back twenty times over
when we strike the pockets, and then we can live where we will, or we
can go across to Guernsey, or to England if you like."

But Mrs. Hamon was silent and full of thought. She had no desire for
wealth, and still less to live in Guernsey or in England, or anywhere in
the world but Sark.

He had been a good husband to her on the whole, until this silver craze
absorbed him. She had never found it necessary to counter his wishes
before. But this idea of selling the farm cut to the very roots of her
life.

For Nance's sake and Bernel's she must oppose it with all that was in
her. If the farm were sold the money would all go into those gaping
black mouths and bottomless pits at Port Gorey. The home would be broken
up--an end of all things. It must not be.

"I should think many times before selling the farm if I were you," she
said quietly, and left it there for the moment.

But old Tom, having made up his mind, and the necessities of the case
pressing, lost no time over the matter.

"I've been speaking to John Guille about that business," he said, next
day, in a confidently casual way.

"About--?"

"About the farm. He'll give me six hundred pounds for it and take the
stock at what it's worth, and he's willing we should stop on as tenants
at fifty pounds a year rent."

His wife was ominously silent. He glanced at her doubtfully.

"I shall stop on as tenant for the present and Tom can go on working
it. When we reach the silver, and the money begins to come back, we can
decide what to do afterwards."

Still his wife said nothing, but her face was white and set. It was hard
for her to put herself in opposition to him, but here she found it
necessary. He was going too far.

It was only when the silence had grown ominous and painful, that she
said, slowly and with difficulty--

"I'm sorry to look like going against you, Tom, but I can't see it right
you should sell the farm."

"It'll make no difference to you and the young ones. I'll see to that."

"It's not right and you mustn't do it."

"Mustn't do it!--And it's as good as done!"

"It can't be done until your mother and I consent, and we can't see it's
a right thing to do."

"Can't you see that you're only saving the farm for Tom?" he argued
wrathfully, bottling his anger as well as he could. "It's nothing to you
and the young ones in any case."

"I know, but all the same it's not right. If it was to buy another farm
it would be different, for you could leave it as you choose. But to
throw away the money on those mines--"

This was a lapse from diplomacy and old Tom resented it.

"Throw the money away!" he shouted, casting all restraint to the winds.
"Who's going to throw the money away? It's like you women. You never can
see beyond the ends of your noses. I'll tell you what I'll do--I'll pay
you out your dower right in hard cash. Will that satisfy you?"

If he died she would have a life interest in one-third of the farm, but
could not, of course, will it to Nance or Bernel. If he sold the farm
and paid her her lawful third in cash, she could do what she chose with
it. It was therefore distinctly to her own interest to fall in with his
plan.

But, dearly as she would have liked to make some provision, however
small, for Nance and Bernel, her whole Sark soul was up in arms against
the idea of selling the farm.

It would feel like a break-up of life. Nothing, she was sure, would ever
be the same again.

"It's not right," she said simply.

"You're a fool--" and then the look on her quiet face--such a look as
she might have worn if he had struck her--penetrated the storm-cloud of
his anger. He remembered her years of wifely patience and faithful
service, "--a foolish woman. A Sark wife should know which side of her
bread the butter is on. Can't you see--"

"I know all that, Tom, but I hope you'll give up this notion of selling
the farm. Your mother feels just as I do about it. We've talked it
over--"

"I'll talk to her," and he went in at once to the old lady's room.

But Grannie gave him no time for argument.

"It's you's the fool, Tom," she said decisively, as he crossed the
threshold. "There's not enough silver in Sark to make a plate for your
coffin."

"I brought out more'n enough to make your plate and mine, myself
to-day," he said triumphantly.

"Ah, bah! You'd have done better for yourself and for Sark if you'd let
it lie."

"I'd have done better still if I'd got twice as much."

"If the good God set silver inside Sark, it was because He thought it
was the best place for it, and it's not for the likes of you to be
trying to get it out."

"What's it there for if it's not to be got out?"

"You mark me, Tom Hamon, no good will come of all this upsetting and
digging out the insides of the Island--nenni-gia!"

"Pergui, mother, where do you think all the silver and gold in the world
came from?"

"It didn't come out of our Sark rocks any way, mon gars."

"Good thing for us if it had, ma fe! But, see you here, mother, if I
sell the farm it's not you and Nance that need trouble. If I pay out
your dowers in hard cash you're both of you better off than you are now,
and I'm better off too. It's only Tom could complain, and--"

"It's hard on the lad."

"Bidemme, it's no more than he deserves for his goings-on! Maybe it'll
do him good to have to work for his living."

"And you would do that to get your bit more money to throw into those
big holes?"

"Never you mind me. I'll take care of myself, and we'll see who's wisest
in the end. Now, will you agree to it?"

"I'll talk it over with Nancy again," and the big black sun-bonnet
nodded with sapient significance. "Send her to me."

"It's from you I got my good sense," said old Tom approvingly, and went
off in search of his wife, while the clever old lady pondered deep
schemes.

"Here's the way of it, Nancy," she said, when Mrs. Hamon came in. "He's
crazy on these silver mines, and he's willing to pay out our dowers,
yours and mine, so that he may throw the rest into the big holes at Port
Gorey. Ch'est b'en! Your money and mine take more than half of what he
gets. If you'll put yours to mine I'll make up the difference from what
I've saved, and we'll retraite the farm, and it shall go to Nance and
Bernel when the time comes."

"I can't help thinking it's rather hard on Tom," suggested Mrs. Hamon,
with less vigour than before.

The idea appealed strongly to her maternal feelings and she had suffered
much from Tom; still her instinct for right was there and was not to be
stifled with a word.

"If you feel so when the time comes we could divide it among them, and
till then Tom would have to behave himself," said the wily old lady,
with a chuckle.

That again appealed strongly to Mrs. Hamon.

"Yes, I think I would agree to that," she said, after thinking it all
over.

All things considered, Grannie's scheme was an excellent one and worthy
of her.

By a curious anomaly of Sark law, though a man may not mortgage his
property without the consent of his next-in-succession, he can sell it
outright and do what he chooses with the proceeds. His wife has a dower
right of one-third of both real and personal estate, into which she
enters upon his death. The right, however, is there while he still
lives, and must be taken into consideration in any sale of the property.

All property is sold subject to the "retraite"; in plain English, no
sale is completed for six weeks, and within that time every member of
the seller's family, in due order of succession, even to the collateral
branches, has the right to take over, or withdraw, the property at the
same price as has been agreed upon, paying in addition to the Seigneur
the trezieme or thirteenth part of the price, as by law provided.

If Grannie's scheme were carried out, therefore, she and Mrs. Hamon
would become owners of the farm. Tom would be there on sufferance and
might be kept within bounds or kicked out. Old Tom would have something
more to throw into the holes at Port Gorey. And Nance and Bernel could
be adequately provided for. An excellent scheme, therefore, for all
concerned--except young Tom, who would have to behave himself better
than he was in the habit of doing or suffer the consequences.

"Yes," said Nancy. "I don't see that I'd be doing right by Nance and
Bernel not to agree to that. And if Tom behaves himself," at which
Grannie grunted doubtfully, "he can have his share when the time comes."




CHAPTER VII

HOW GARD FOUGHT GALES AND TOM


So far the discussion as to the sale of the farm had been confined to
the elders.

Young Tom had viewed John Guille's visits to the place with the lowering
suspicion of a bull at a stranger's invasion of his field. He wondered
what was going on and surmised that it was nothing to his advantage.

Words had been rare between him and his father since his refusal to lend
himself to a loan on the farm, but his suspicion got the better of his
obstinacy at last.

"What's John Guille want coming about here so much?" he demanded
bluntly.

"I suppose he can come if he wants to. He's going to buy the farm."

"Going--to--buy--the--farm!... You--going--to--sell--the--farm--away--
from--me?" roared young Tom, like the bull wounded to the quick.

"Ouaie, pardi! And why not? You had the chance of saving it and you
wouldn't."

"If you do it, I'll--"

"Ouaie! You'll--"

"I'll--Go'zammin, I'll--I'll--"

"Unless you're a fool, mon gars, you'll be careful what you say or do.
It'll all come back from the mines and you'll have your share if you
behave yourself."

"---- you and your mines!" was Tom's valedictory, and he flung away in
mortal anger; anger, too, which, from a Sark point of view, was by no
means unjustified. Selling the estate away from the rightful heir was
disinheritance, a blow below the belt which most testators reserve until
they are safe from reach of bodily harm.

Tom left the house and cut all connection with his family. He drifted
away like a threatening cloud, and the sun shone out, and Stephen Gard,
with the rest, found greater comfort in his room than they had ever
found in his company.

So gracious, indeed, did the atmosphere of the house become, purged of
Tom, that Gard, to his great joy, found even Nance not impossible of
approach.

He had always treated her with extremest deference and courtesy,
respecting, as far as he was able, her evident wish for nothing but the
most distant intercourse.

But he was such a very great change from Tom!

She caught his dark eyes fixed on her at times with a look that reminded
her of Helier Baker's black spaniel's, who was a very close friend of
hers. They had neither dog nor cat at present at La Closerie, both
having been scrimped by the silver mines, when old Tom's first bad
attack of economy came on.

Then, at table, Gard was always quietly on the look-out to anticipate
her wants. That was a refreshing novelty. Even Bernel, her special
crony, thought only of his own requirements when food stood before him.

Now and again Gard began to venture on a question direct to her,
generally concerning some bit of the coast he had been scrambling about,
and she found it rather pleasant to be able to give information about
things he did not know to this undoubtedly clever mine captain.

So, little by little, he grew into her barest toleration but apparently
nothing more, and was puzzled at her aloofness and reserve, not
understanding at all her bitter feeling against the mines and everything
connected with them.

The first time he went to church with her and Bernel was a great
white-stone day to him.

He had gone by himself once every Sunday, and done his best to follow
the service in French, which he was endeavouring to pick up as best he
could. And, if he could only now and again come across a word he
understood, still the being in church and worshipping with others--even
though it was in an unknown tongue--the sound of the chants and hymns
and responses, and the mild austerity and reverent intonation of the
good old Vicar, all induced a Sabbath feeling in him, and made a welcome
change from the rougher routine of the week, which he would have missed
most sorely.

On that special afternoon, he had been lying on the green wall of the
old French fort, enjoying that most wonderful view over the shimmering
blue sea, with Herm and Jethou resting on it like great green velvet
cushions, and Guernsey gleaming softly in the distance, and Brecqhou and
the Gouliot Head, and all the black outlying rocks fringed with creamy
foam, till it should be time to go along to church.

When he heard voices in the road below and saw Nance and Bernel, he
jumped up on the spur of the moment, and pushed through the gorse and
bracken, and stood waiting for them.

"Will you let me join you?" he asked, as they came up, fallen shyly
silent.

"We don't mind," said Bernel, and they went along together.

"This always strikes me afresh, each time I see it, as one of the most
extraordinary places I've come across," said Gard, as they dipped down
towards the Coupee.

"Wait till we're coming home," said Bernel hopefully.

"Why?"

"You see those clouds over there? That's wind--sou'-west--you'll see
what it's like after church."

"Your gales are as extraordinary as all the rest--and your tides and
currents and sea-mists. I suppose one must be born here to understand
them. We have a fine coast in Cornwall, but I think you beat us."

"Of course. This is Sark."

"And does no one ever tumble over the Coupee in the dark?"

"N--o, not often, any way. Nance once saw a man blown over."

"That was a bad thing to see," said Gard, turning towards her. "How was
it?"

"I was coming from school--"

"All alone?"

"Yes, all alone. The others had gone on; I'd been kept in, and it was
nearly dark. It was blowing hard, and when I got to the first rock here
I thought it was going to blow me over. So I went down on my hands and
knees and was just going to crawl, when old Hirzel Mollet came down the
other side with a great sheaf of wheat on his back. He was taking it to
the Seigneur for his tithes. And then in a moment he gave a shout and I
saw he was gone."

"That was terrible. What did you do?"

"I screamed and crawled back across the narrow bit to the cutting, and
ran screaming up to the cottages at Plaisance, and Thomas Carre and his
men came running down. But they could do nothing. They went round in a
boat from the Creux, but he was dead."

"And how did you get home?"

"Thomas Carre took me across and I ran on alone, but it was months
before I could forget poor old Hirzel Mollet."

"I should think so, indeed. That was a terrible thing to see."

The opening of the mines, and the influx of the Welsh and Cornishmen and
their wives and children, with their new and up-to-date ideas of living
and dressing, had wrought a great and not altogether wholesome change
upon the original inhabitants.

All the week they were hard at work in their fields or their boats, but
on Sunday the lonely lanes leading to Little Sark were thronged with
sightseers, curious to inspect the mines and the latest odd fashions
among the miners' wives and daughters.

Odd, and extremely useless little parasols, were then the vogue in
England. The miners' women-folk flaunted these before the dazzled eyes
of the Sark girls, and Sark forthwith burst into flower of many-coloured
parasols.

The mine ladies dressed in printed cottons of strange and wonderful
patterns. The Sark girls must do the same.

"Tiens!" ejaculated Nance more than once, as they walked. "Here is Judi
Le Masurier with a new pink parasol!--and a straw bonnet with green
strings!--and every day you'll see her about the fields without so much
as a sun-bonnet on! And Rachel Guille has got a new print dress all red
roses and lilac! Mon Gyu, what are we coming to!"

She had many such comments and still more unspoken ones. But Stephen
Gard, glancing, whenever he could do so unperceived, at the trim but
plainly-dressed little sun-bonneted figure by his side, vowed in his
heart that the whole of these others rolled into one were not to be
compared with her, and that he would give all the silver in the mines of
Sark to win her appreciation and regard.

As they turned the corner at Vauroque, they came suddenly on a number of
men lounging on the low wall, and among them Tom Hamon, pipe in mouth
and hands in pockets.

As they passed he made some jocular remark in the patois which provoked
a guffaw from the rest, and reddened Nance's face, and caused Bernel to
glance up at Gard and jerk round angrily towards Tom.

"What did he say?" asked Gard, stopping.

But Nance hurried on and he could not but follow.

"What was it?" he asked again, as he caught up with her.

"If you please, do not mind him. It was just one of his rudenesses."

"They want knocking out of him."

"He is very rude," said Nance, and they passed the Vicarage and turned
up the stony lane to the church.

Gard was surprised by the speedy verification of Bernel's weather
forecast. Before the service was over the wind was howling round the
building with the sounds of unleashed furies, and when they got out it
was almost dark.

They bent to the gale and pressed on, Gard with a discomforting
remembrance that the Coupee lay ahead.

As they passed Vauroque there seemed a still larger crowd of loafers at
the corner, and again Tom's voice called rudely after them.

Gard turned promptly and strode back to where he was sitting on the
wall, dangling his feet in devil-may-care fashion. Tom jumped down to
meet him.

"Say that again in English, will you?" said Gard angrily.

"Go to--!" said Tom.

Then Gard's left fist caught him on the hinge of the right jaw, and he
reeled back among the others who had jumped down to back him up.

"Well--? Want any more?" asked Gard stormily.

"You wait," growled Tom, nursing his jaw, "I'll talk to you one of these
days."

"Whenever you like, you cur. What you need is a sound thrashing and a
kick over the Coupee."

To his surprise none of the others joined in. But he did not know them.

They might guffaw at Tom's unseemly pleasantries, but they held him in
no high esteem--either for himself or for his position, since word of
the sale of La Closerie had got about.

Then they were a hardy crew and held personal courage and prowess in
high respect. And in this matter there could be no possible doubt as to
where the credit lay.

"Goin' to fight him, Tom?" drawled one, in the patois.

"---- him!" growled Tom, but made no move that way.

And Gard turned and went over to Nance and Bernel, who were sheltering
from the storm in lee of one of the cottages.

If he could have seen it, there was a warmer feeling in her heart for
him than had ever been there before--a novel feeling, too, of respect
and confidence such as she had never entertained towards any other man
in all her life.

For that quick blow had been struck on her behalf, she knew; and it was
vastly strange, and somehow good, to feel that a great strong man was
ready to stand up for her and, if necessary, to fight for her.

She pressed silently on against the gale, with an odd little glow in her
heart, and a feeling as though something new had suddenly come into her
life.

The gale caught them at the Coupee, and the crossing seemed to Gard not
without its risks.

Bernel bent and ran on through the darkness without a thought of danger.

Gard hesitated one moment and Nance stretched a hand to him, and he took
it and went steadily across.

And, oh, the thrill of that first living touch of her! The feel of the
warm nervous little hand sent a tingling glow through him such as he had
never in his life experienced before. Verily, a white-stone day this, in
spite of winds and darkness!

The gale howled like ten thousand demons, and the noise of the waves in
Grande Greve came up to them in a ceaseless savage roar. Gard confessed
to himself that, alone, he would never have dared to face that perilous
storm-swept bridge. But the small hand of a girl made all the difference
and he stepped alongside her without a tremor.

"B'en, Monsieur Gard, was I right?" shouted Bernel in his ear, as they
stepped within the shelter of the cutting on the farther side.

"You were right. It's a terrible place in a gale."

"You wait," shouted Bernel. "We're not home yet."

"No more Coupees, any way," and they bent again into the storm.

They had not gone more than a hundred yards when, through some freakish
funnelling of the tumbled headlands, the gale gripped them like a giant
playing with pigmies, caught them up, flung them bodily across the road
and held Gard and Bernel pinned and panting against the green bank,
while Nance disappeared over it into the shrieking darkness.

"Good heavens!" gasped Gard, fearful lest she should have been blown
over the cliffs, and wriggled himself up under the ceaseless thrashing
of the gale and was whirled off the top into the field beyond.

There the pressure was less, and, getting on to his hands and knees to
crawl in search of Nance, he found her close beside him crouching in the
lee of the grassy dyke.

He crept into shelter beside her, and presently, in the lull after a
fiercer blast than usual, she set off, bent almost double, and in a
moment they were in comparative quiet. Nance crawled through a gap into
the road and they found Bernel waiting for them.

"Knew you'd come through there. That's what that gap's made for," he
shouted.

"I've been in many a storm but I never felt wind like that before," said
Gard, as soon as his breath came back.

"If you'd stopped with me you'd have been all right," said Bernel.
"There was no need for you to go after Nance. We've been through that
lots of times, haven't we, Nance?"

"Lots."

"I shall know next time," said Gard, and to Nance it was a fresh
experience to think of some one going out of his way to be of possible
service to her.




CHAPTER VIII

HOW TOM WANTED TO BUT DIDN'T DARE


Before the six weeks allowed by Sark law for the retraiting of the
property had expired, Grannie and Mrs. Hamon put in their claims, and it
became generally known that they would become the new owners of La
Closerie, in place of John Guille.

When the rumour at length reached Tom's ears, he, not unnaturally
perhaps, set down the whole matter as a plot to oust him from his
heritage and put Nance and Bernel in his place.

So his anger grew, and he was powerless. And the impotence of an angry
man may lead him into gruesome paths. Smouldering fires burst out at
times into devastating flames, and maddened bulls put down their heads
and charge regardless of consequences.

When Tom Hamon asked Peter Mauger to lend him his gun to go
rabbit-shooting one night, Peter, if he had been a thoughtful man, would
have declined.

But Peter was above all things easy-going, and anything but thoughtful
of such matters as surged gloomily in Tom's angry head, and he lent him
his gun as a matter of course.

And Tom went off across the Coupee into Little Sark, nursing his black
devil and thinking vaguely and gloomily of the things he would like to
do. For to rob a man of his rights in this fashion was past a man's
bearing, and if he was to be ruined for the sake of that solemn-faced
slip of a Nance and that young limb of a Bernel, he might as well take
payment for it all, and cut their crowing, and give them something to
remember him by.

He had no very definite intentions. His mind was a chaos of whirling
black furies. He would like to pay somebody out for the wrongs under
which he was suffering--who, or how, was of little moment. He had been
wounded, he wanted to hit back.

He turned off the Coupee to the left and struck down through the gorse
and bracken towards the Pot, and then crept along the cliffs and across
the fields towards La Closerie--still for three days his, in the
reversion; after that, gone from him irrevocably--a galling shame and
not to be borne by any man that called himself a man.

Should he lie in the hedge and shoot down the old man as he came in from
those cursed mines which had started all the trouble? Or should he walk
right into the house and shoot and fell whatever he came across? If he
must suffer it would at all events be some satisfaction to think that he
had made them suffer too.

From where he stood he could look right in through the open door, and
could hear their voices--Nance and Bernel and Mrs. Hamon--the
interlopers, the schemers, the stealers of his rights.

The shaft of light was eclipsed suddenly as Nance came out and tripped
across the yard on some household duty.

He remembered how he used to terrify her by springing out of the
darkness at her. She had helped to bring all this trouble about.

Why should he not--? Why should he not--?

And while his gun still shook in his hands to the wild throbbing of his
pulses, Nance passed out of his sight into the barn.

The deed a man may do on the spur of the moment, when his brain is on
fire, is not so readily done when it has to be thought about.

Then Mrs. Hamon came to the door, and called to Nance to bring with her
a piece or two of wood for the fire.

Here was his chance! Here was the head and front of the offence, past,
present, and future! If she had never come into the family there would
have been no Nance, no Bernel, no selling of the farm, maybe. A movement
of the arms, the crooking of a finger, and things would be even between
them.

But--it would still be he who would have to pay--as always!

All through he had been the sufferer, and if he did this thing he must
suffer still more--always he who must pay.

The man who hesitates is lost, or saved. When the contemplator of evil
deeds begins also to contemplate consequences, reason is beginning to
resume her sway.

Then he heard heavy footsteps and voices. His father and Stephen Gard.

Another chance! Gard he hated. There was a bruise on his right jaw
still. And the old man!--he had cut him out of his inheritance by going
crazy over those cursed mines.

"I'm sorry you have gone so far," Gard was saying as they passed. "If
you had consulted me I should have advised against it. Mining is always
more or less of a speculation. I would never, if I could help it, let
any man put more into a mine than he can afford to lose."

"If you know a thing's a good thing you want all you can get out of
it," said old Tom stoutly.

"Yes, if--" and they passed into the house, while Tom in the hedge was
considering which of them he would soonest see dead.

Now they were all inside together. A full charge of small shot might do
considerable and satisfactory damage.

But thought of the certain consequences to himself welled coldly up in
him again, and he slunk noiselessly away, cursing himself for leaving
undone the work he had come out to do.

On the common above the Pot, a terrified white scut rose almost under
his feet and sped along in front of him. He blew it into rags, and was
so ashamed of his prowess that he kicked the remnants into the gorse and
went home empty-handed.




CHAPTER IX

HOW OLD TOM FOUND THE SILVER HEART


One of the first things Stephen Gard had seen to, when he got matters
into his own hands, was the safeguarding of the mines from ever-possible
irruption of the sea. The great steam pumps kept the workings reasonably
clear of drainage water, but no earthly power could drain the sea if it
once got in.

The central shafts had sunk far below sea-level. The lateral galleries
had, in some cases, run out seawards and were now extending far under
the sea itself.

From the whirling coils of the tides and races round the coast, he
judged that the sea-bed was as seamed and broken and full of faults as
the visible cliffs ashore.

In bad weather, the men in those submarine galleries and the
outbranching tunnels could hear the crash of the waves above their
heads, and the rolling and grinding of the mighty boulders with which
they disported.

If, by chance, the sea should break through, the peril to life and
property would be great.

He therefore caused to be constructed and fitted inside each tunnel, at
the point where it branched from its main gallery, a stout iron door,
roughly hinged at the top and falling, in case of need, into the flange
of a thick wooden frame. The framework was fitted to the opening on the
seaward side, in a groove cut deep into the rock round each side and
top and bottom. The heavy iron door, when open, lay up against the roof
of the tunnel and was supported by two wooden legs. If the sea should
break through, the first rush of the water would sweep away the
supporting legs, the iron door would fall with a crash into the flange
of the wooden frame, and the greater the pressure the tighter it would
fit.

So the weight of the sea would seal the iron door against the wooden
casement, which would swell and press always tighter against the rock,
and that boring would be closed for ever. And if any man should be
inside the tunnel when the sea broke through, there he must stop,
drowned like a rat in its hole, unless by a miracle he could make his
way along the tunnel before the trap-door fell.

Gard never ceased to enjoin the utmost caution on the men who undertook
these outermost experimental borings.

His strict injunctions were to cease work at the first sign of water in
these undersea tunnels, make for the gallery, close the trap, and await
events.

Believing absolutely in the existence of one or more great central
deposits whence all these thin veins of silver had come, and hoping to
strike them at every blow of his pick, old Tom Hamon was the keenest
explorer and opener of new leads in the mine.

"The silver's there all right," he said, time and again, "it only wants
finding," and he pushed ahead, here and there, wherever he thought the
chances most favourable.

He took his rightful pay along with the rest for the work he did, but it
was not for wages he wrought. Ever just beyond the point of his
energetic pick lay fortune, and he was after it with all his heart and
soul and bodily powers.

For months he had been following up a vein which ran out under the sea,
and grew richer and richer as he laid it bare. He believed it would lead
him to the mother vein, and that to the heart of all the Sark silver.
And so he toiled, early and late, and knew no weariness.

His tunnel, in places not more than three and four feet high and between
two and three feet wide, extended now several hundred feet under the
sea, and was fitted at the gallery end with the usual raised iron door.

It was hot work in there, in the dim-lighted darkness, in spite of the
fact that the sea was close above his head. Fortunately, here and there,
he had come upon curious little chambers like empty bubbles in one-time
molten rock, ten feet across and as much in height, some of them, and
curiously whorled and wrought, and these allowed him breathing spaces
and welcome relief from the crampings of the passage.

When he had broken into such a chamber it needed, at times, no little
labour to rediscover his vein on the opposite side. But he always found
it in time, and broke through the farther wall with unusual difficulty,
and went on.

The men generally worked in pairs, but old Tom would have no one with
him. He did all the work, picking and hauling the refuse single-handed.
The work should be his alone, his alone the glory of the great and
ultimate discovery.

The rocks above him sweated and dripped at times, but that was only to
be expected and gave him no anxiety. Alone with his eager hopes he
chipped and picked, and felt no loneliness because of the flame of hope
that burned within him. Above him he could hear the long roll and growl
of the wave-tormented boulders--now a dull, heavy fall like the blow of
a gigantic mallet, and again a long-drawn crash like shingle grinding
down a hillside. But these things he had heard before and had grown
accustomed to.

And so it was fated that, one day, after patiently picking round a great
piece of rock till it was loosened from its ages-old bed, he felt it
tremble under his hand, and leaning his weight against it, it
disappeared into space beyond.

That had happened before when he struck one of the chambers, and he felt
no uneasiness. If there had been water beyond, it would have given him
notice by oozing round the rock as he loosened it. The brief rush of
foul gas, which always followed the opening of one of these hollows, he
avoided by lying flat on the ground until he felt the air about him
sweeter again.

Then, enlarging the aperture with his pick, he scrambled through into
this chamber now first opened since time began.

It was like many he had seen before, but considerably larger. Holding
his light at arm's length, above his head, a million little eyes
twinkled back at him as the rays shot to and fro on the pointed facets
of the rock crystals which hung from the roof and started out of the
walls and ground.

The gleaming fingers seemed all pointed straight at him. Was it in
mockery or in acknowledgment of his prowess?

For, in among the pointing fingers, it seemed to him that the
silver-bearing veins ran thick as the setting of an ancient jewel,
twisted and curling and winding in and out so that his eyes were dazzled
with the wonder of it all.

"A man! A man at last! Since time began we have awaited him, and this
is he at last!" so those myriad eyes and pointing fingers seemed to cry
to him.

And up above, the roar and growl of the sea sounded closer than ever
before.

But he had found his treasure and he heeded nought beside. Here, of a
surety, he said to himself, was the silver heart from which the
scattered veins had been projected. He had found what he had sought with
such labours and persistency. What else mattered?

And then, without a moment's warning--the end.

No signal crackings, no thin jets or streams from the green immensity
beyond.

Just one universal collapse, one chaotic climacteric, begun and ended in
the same instant, as the crust of the chamber, no longer supported by
the in-pent air, dissolved under the irresistible pressure of the sea.

Where the sparkling chamber had been was a whirling vortex of bubbling
green water, in which tumbled grotesquely the body of a man.

The water boiled furiously along the tunnel and foamed into the gallery.
The wooden supports of the iron door gave way; the door sank slowly into
its appointed place.

Old Tom Hamon was dead and buried.




CHAPTER X

HOW YOUNG TOM FOUND HIS MATCH


The news spread quickly.

Tom Hamon heard it as he sat brooding over his wrongs and cursing the
chicken-heartedness and fear of consequences which had robbed him of his
revenge.

He started up with an incredulous curse and tore across the Coupee to
the mines to make sure.

But there was no doubt about it. Old Tom was dead: the six weeks were
still two days short of their fulfilment; the property was his; his day
had come.

He walked straight to La Closerie, and stalked grimly into the kitchen,
where, as it happened, they were sitting over a doleful and long-delayed
meal.

Mrs. Hamon had been too overwhelmed by the unexpected blow to consider
all its bearings. Grannie, looking beyond, had foreseen consequences and
trouble with Tom, and had sent for Stephen Gard and given him some
elementary instruction relative to the laws of succession in Sark.

Tom stalked in upon them with malevolent triumph. They had tried their
best to oust him from his inheritance and the act of God had spoiled
them. He felt almost virtuous.

But his natural truculence, and his not altogether unnatural exultation
at the frustration of these plans for his own upsetting, overcame all
else. Of regret for their personal loss and his own he had none.

"Oh--ho! Mighty fine, aren't we, feasting on the best," he began. "Let
me tell you all this is mine now, spite of all your dirty tricks, and
you can get out, all of you, and the sooner the better. Eating my best
butter, too! Ma fe, fat is good enough for the likes of you," and he
stretched a long arm and lifted the dish of golden butter from the
board--butter, too, which Nance and her mother had made themselves after
also milking the cows.

"Put that down!" said Gard, in a voice like the taps of a hammer.

"You get out--bravache! Bretteur! I'm master here."

"In six weeks--if you live that long. Until things are properly divided
you'll keep out of this, if you're well advised."

"I will, will I? We'll see about that, Mister Bully. I know what you're
up to, trying to fool our Nance with your foreign ways, and I won't have
it. She's not for the likes of you or any other man that's got a wife
and children over in England--"

This was the suddenly-thought-of burden of a discussion over the cups
one night at the canteen, soon after Gard's arrival, when the
possibility of his being a married man had been mooted and had remained
in Tom's turgid brain as a fact.

"By the Lord!" cried Gard, starting up in black fury, "if you can't
behave yourself I'll break every bone in your body."

And Nance's face, which had unconsciously stiffened at Tom's words,
glowed again at Gard's revelation of the natural man in him, and her
eyes shone with various emotions--doubts, hopes, fears, and a keen
interest in what would follow.

The first thing that followed was the dish of butter, which hurtled past
Gard's head and crashed into the face of the clock, and then fell with a
flop to the earthen floor.

The next was Tom's lowered head and cumbrous body, as he charged like a
bull into Gard and both rolled to the ground, the table escaping
catastrophe by a hair's-breadth.

Mrs. Hamon had sprung up with clasped hands and piteous face. Nance and
Bernel had sprung up also, with distress in their faces but still more
of interest. They had come to a certain reliance on Gard's powers, and
how many and many a time had they longed to be able to give Tom a
well-deserved thrashing!

Through the open door of her room came Grannie's hard little voice, "Now
then! Now then! What are you about there?" but no one had time to tell
her.

Gard was up in a moment, panting hard, for Tom's bull-head had caught
him in the wind.

"If you want ... to fight ... come outside!" he jerked.

"---- you!" shouted Tom, as he struggled to his knees and then to his
feet. "I'll smash you!" and he lowered his head and made another blind
rush.

But this time Gard was ready for him, and a stout buffet on the ear as
he passed sent him crashing in a heap into the bowels of the clock,
which had witnessed no such doings since Tom's great-grandfather brought
it home and stood it in its place, and it testified to its amazement at
them by standing with hands uplifted at ten minutes to two until it was
repaired many months afterwards.

Tom got up rather dazedly, and Gard took him by the shoulders and ran
him outside before he had time to pull himself together.

"Now," said Gard, shaking him as a bull-dog might a calf. "See here!
You're not wanted here at present, and if you make any more trouble
you'll suffer for it," and he gave him a final whirl away from the house
and went in and closed the door.

Tom stood gazing at it in dull fury, thought of smashing the window,
picked up a stone, remembered just in time that it would be his window,
so flung the stone and a curse against the door and departed.

"I'm sorry," said Gard, looking deprecatingly at Nance. "I'm afraid I
lost my temper."

"It was all his fault," said Nance. "Did he hurt you?"

"Only my feelings. He had no right to say such things or do what he
did."

"It's always good to see him licked," said Bernel with gusto. "Nance and
I used to try, but he was too big for us."

Mrs. Hamon had gone in with a white face to explain things to Grannie.

She came back presently and said briefly to Gard, "She wants you," and
he went in to the old lady.

"You did well, Stephen Gard," she chirped. "Stand by them, for they'll
need it. He's a bad lot is Tom, and he'll make things uncomfortable when
he comes here to live. When Nancy takes her third of what's left of the
house, that'll be only two rooms, so you'll have to look out for
another, and maybe you'll not find it easy to get one in Little Sark. If
you take my advice you'll try Charles Guille at Clos Bourel, or Thomas
Carre at the Plaisance Cottages by the Coupee, they're kindly folk
both. I've told Nancy to get Philip Tanquerel of Val Creux to help her
portion the lots, and it'll be no easy job, for Tom will choose the best
and get all he can."

They were agreeably surprised to hear no more of Tom, but learned before
long that, on the strength of his unexpected good fortune, he had gone
over to Guernsey to pass, in ways that most appealed to him, the six
weeks allowed by the law for the settlement of his father's affairs.

Within that six weeks Philip Tanquerel of Val Creux had, on Mrs. Hamon's
behalf, to allot all old Tom's estate, house, fields, cattle,
implements, furniture, into three as equal portions as he could contrive
with his most careful balancing of pros and cons. For, with Solomon-like
wisdom, Sark law entails upon the widow the apportionment of the three
lots into which everything is divided, but allows the heir first choice
of any two of them, the remaining lot becoming the widow's dower.

No light undertaking, therefore, the apportionment of those lots, or the
widow may be left with only bedrooms to live in, and an ill proportion
of grazing ground for her cattle and herself to live upon. For, be sure
that when it comes to the picking of these lots, even the best of sons
will pick the plums, and when such an one as Tom Hamon is in question it
is as well to mingle the plums and the sloes with an exactitude of
proportionment that will allow of no advantage either way.




CHAPTER XI

HOW GARD DREW NEARER TO HIS HEART'S DESIRE


Gard's isolation was brought home to him when he endeavoured to find
another lodging in Little Sark.

Accommodation was, of course, limited. Many of the miners had to tramp
in each day from Sark. There was still, in spite of all his tact and
efforts, somewhat of a feeling against him as a new-comer, an innovator,
a tightener of loose cords, and no one offered to change quarters to
oblige him. And so, in the end, he took Grannie's advice and found a
room in one of the thatch-roofed cottages which offered their
white-washed shoulders to the road just where it rose out of the further
side of the Coupee into Sark.

They were quiet, farmer-fisher folk who lived there, having nothing to
do with the mines and little beyond a general interest in them.

When not at work, he was thrown much upon himself, and if in his rambles
he chanced upon Bernel Hamon it was a treat, and if, as happened all too
seldom, upon Nance as well, an enjoyment beyond words.

But Nance was a busy maid, with hens and chickens, and cows and calves,
and pigs and piglets claiming her constant attention, and it was only
now and again that she could so arrange her duties as to allow of a
flight with Bernel--a flight which always took the way to the sea and
developed presently into a bathing revel wherein she flung cares and
clothes to the winds, or into a fishing excursion, in which pleasure and
profit and somewhat of pain were evenly mixed.

For, though she loved the sea and ate fresh-caught fish with as much
gusto as any, she hated seeing them caught--almost as much as she hated
having her fowls or piglets slaughtered for eating purposes, and never
would touch them--a delicacy of feeling at which Bernel openly scoffed
but could not laugh her out of.

She had sentiments also regarding the rabbits Bernel shot on the cliffs,
but being wild, and she herself having had no hand in their upbringing
and not having known them intimately, she accepted them as natural
provision, though not without compunctions at times concerning possible
families of orphans left totally unprovided for.

When she did permit herself a few hours off duty she did it with a
whole-hearted enjoyment--approaching the naive abandon of
childhood--which, to Gard's sober restraint, when he was graciously
permitted to witness it, was wholly charming.

By degrees, and especially after her father's tragic death, Nance's
feelings towards the stranger had perceptibly changed.

He might be an alien, an Englishman; but he was at all events a
Cornishman, and she had heard say that the men of Cornwall and of the
Islands and of the Bretagne had much in common, just as their rugged
coasts had. And England, after all, was allied to the Islands, belonged
to them in fact, and was indeed quite as essential a part of the Queen's
dominions as the Islands themselves, and to harbour unfriendly feeling
towards your own relations--unless indeed, as in the case of Tom, they
had given you ample cause--would be surely the mark of a small and
narrow mind.

And he might be a miner; and mines, and most miners, were naturally
hateful to her. But he had been a sailor, and was miner only by accident
as it were, and she knew that he loved the sea. Allowance, she supposed,
must be made for men getting twists in their brains--like her father. He
had gone crazy over these mines though he had been sensible enough in
other matters.

What her careful, surreptitious observation of him, from the depths and
round the wings of her sun-bonnet, told her was that he was an upright
man, and true, and bold, with a spirit which he kept well in hand but
which could blaze like lightning on occasion, and a strength which he
could turn to excellent purpose when the need arose.

And--and--she admitted it shyly to herself and not without wonder, and
found herself dwelling upon it as she sang softly to the ping-pang of
the milk into the pail, or the swoosh of it in the churn--he thought of
her, Nance Hamon--perhaps he even admired her a little--any way he was
certainly interested in her, and in his shy reserved way he showed a
desire for her company which she no longer found pleasure in defeating
as she had done at first.

Undoubtedly an odd feeling, this, of being cared for by an outside
man--- but withal tending to increase of self-esteem and therefore not
unpleasing.

Peter Mauger, indeed--but then she had never looked upon Peter as
anything but Peter, and the shadow of Tom had always obscured him to
her. Stephen Gard was a man, and a different kind of a man from Peter
altogether.

She remembered, with a slight reddening still of the warm brown cheeks
whenever she thought of it--how, on the previous Sunday afternoon, she
and Bernel had gone running over the downs through the waist-high
bracken towards Breniere, the tide in their favourite pool below the
rocks being too high for bathing. And on the slope above the Cromlech
they had come suddenly on Gard, lying there looking out over the sea
towards L'Etat.

He had jumped up at sight of them and stood hesitating a moment.

"Going for a bathe?" he asked, knowing the usual course of their
proceedings.

"Yes, we were," said Bernel. "You going?" with a glance at the towel
Gard had brought out on the chance of a dip.

"I'd thought of it, but your tides and currents here are so
troublesome--"

"Oh, we know all about 'em. They're all right when you know."

"I suppose so, but--" with a look at Nance, "I'll clear out."

"You're not coming?"

"Your sister wouldn't like it."

"Nance?" with a look of surprise. "She won't mind. Will you, Nance?"

Then it was her turn to hesitate, for bathing with Bernel was one thing,
and with Mr. Gard quite another.

"You'll show me another time, Bernel," said Gard, picking up his towel.
"I wouldn't like to spoil your fun now."

"But you wouldn't. Would he, Nance?"

"I don't mind--if you'll give me the cave."

"All the caves you want," said Bernel, scornful at such unusual
stickling on the part of his chum.

"Quite sure you don't mind?" asked Gard, doubtful still.

"If I have the cave. It's generally the one who gets there first, and
Bern goes quicker than I do."

"Of course. You're only a girl," laughed Bernel, as he raced on down the
slope.

And Nance laughed too at his brotherly depreciation, and Gard, who had
never regarded her as only a girl, and whose thoughts of her were very
absorbing and uplifting, happening to catch her eye, laughed also, and
so they went down towards the sea in pleasant enough humour and the
nearest approach to good-fellowship they had yet attained.

Nance disappeared round a corner, and the next he saw of her she was
swimming boldly out towards Breniere point, and in a moment he and
Bernel were after her.

"Don't go past the point," jerked Bernel.

"She's gone."

"She's a fish and knows her way," and just then they ploughed into what
at first looked to Gard like a perfectly smooth spot amid the troubled
waters, and then he was lifted from below and flung awry and out of his
stroke, and tossed and tumbled till he felt as helpless as a dead fish.
Then a fresh coil of the bubbling tide whirled him to one side and he
was out again in the safety of the dancing waves.

"You see?" cried Bernel. "That's what it's like," and shot into it
headlong.

And Gard, treading water quietly at a safe distance, saw how, every
here and there, great crowns of water came surging up from below, with
such lunging force that they rose in some cases almost a foot above the
neighbouring level of the sea, and he wondered how any swimmer could
make way through them. And yet Nance had cleft them like a seal, and he
could hardly make out her brown head bobbing among the distant waves.

"Is it safe for her?" he cried after Bernel, but the boy's only reply
was a scornful wave of the arm as he pressed on to join her.

Gard had an ample swim, and was dressed and sitting on a rock, when they
came leisurely in, and it seemed to him that never in his life had he
seen anything half so pretty as those shining coils of chestnut hair
with the sea-drops sparkling in them, and the bright energetic face
below, browned with sun and wind, rosy-brown now with her long swim, and
beaded like her hair with pearly drops.

As she swept along below, she gave just one quick up-glance, and then,
with completest ignorance of his presence, turned her head to Bernel and
chattered away to him with most determined nonchalance.

She and Bernel used the long effective side-stroke almost entirely, and
the little arm that flashed in and out so tirelessly was as white as the
garment that fluttered in wavy convolutions about the lithe little body
below.

Gard, as he watched her, felt like a discoverer of hidden treasure,
overwhelmed and intoxicated with the wonder of unexpected riches. He had
come to this wild little land of Sark after silver, and he said to
himself that he had found a pearl beyond price.

In a minute or two they were scrambling up the slope and flung
themselves down beside him for a rest, feeling the strain of unusual
exertion now that the brace and tonic of the water was off them.

"You are bold swimmers," said Gard.

"She's a fish in the water," said Bernel, "and she made me swim almost
as soon as I could walk."

"You see," said Nance, in her decisive little way, "many of our Sark men
won